The software has bugs. The systems sometimes fail. People make mistakes. These are fundamental truths of technology. Hiring the best engineers in the world won’t change this. The best-performing teams and companies build reliable software despite bugs and mistakes. These “unicorn” companies are pushing the boundaries of software reliability through chaos engineering and by embracing resilience engineering. They hire the best and brightest systems engineers to work alongside their software developers to build more reliable systems. But do companies that aren’t unicorns need to become experts in human factors and experts in their software stack in order to engineer reliable systems? Jessica DeVita tells the story of how a team at Microsoft challenged themselves to retrospect their retrospectives and shares what they learned about applying human factors ideas to software development. You’ll learn how a nonexpert can contribute to software robustness and resilience, gain ideas on how to approach an unfamiliar software engineering system, and discover how to investigate the roles that language, accountability, error propagation, and hidden system resilience play in a software engineering system.

1. Retrospecting
our
Retrospectives

2. @allspaw

3. September 18th
, 1980
Damascus, Arkansas

4. Dave Powell made a choice.
It was the kind of choice you
make when you're afraid of
getting in trouble.
He played dumb.

5. “Safety requires
prevention,
prevention requires
honesty, honesty
requires the absence
of fear”

6. “The Air Force officially blamed the
incident on human error. Every guy
that worked in those silos I know dropped
a wrench or a tool at some point in his
career.”

7. Errors as optical illusions
bit.ly/hindsightoinsight

8. Psychological purposes of accident investigation
From : S idney D ekker - 2014

9. “postmortems are deeply social events, conducted in ritual
fashion” Stella Reporthttps://snafucatchers.github.io/#4_1_Capturing_the_value_of_anomalies_through_postmortems

10. “Postmortems are not magic”
Stella Report
You can make them better!
https://www.flickr.com/photos/95205391@N05/29248897560

11. Millions of Users + Most of
Microsoft

12. Data: Internal Microsoft engineering system activity during calendar year 2017
Microsoft Internal Engineering in VSTS by the Numbers
2.8m
Pull requests
> 15m
Git Pushes
42,000
Deployments per day
> 4m
Builds per month
500m
Test executions
per day
500k
Work items
updated per day
5m
Work items
viewed per day

17. https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/vsoservice/?p=16295
In the earlier postmortem, we posed these two questions:
1.What caused the initial failure?
2.Why didn’t the system automatically recover given the reactive measures we already
have in place?
When doing a postmortem for a long running incident like this, it is usually the case that
what caused the start of the incident is the same thing that made the incident long
running… We found in this situation that the event that caused the bad state
and the reason for staying in that state were unrelated. That caused
us to follow the wrong path repeatedly.

18. A question for you

19. Is this the
system?

20. http://stella.report

21. https://snafucatchers.github.io/#3_1_Catching_the_Apache_SNAFU
The Ironies of Automation - Lisanne Bainbridge http://bit.ly/ironiesofautomation
http://stella.report

22. We spend a lot of time “below the line” http://stella.report

23. But “above the line” is where the work happens
http://stella.report

24. http://stella.report

25. The Ironies of Automation - Lisanne Bainbridge
http://bit.ly/ironiesofautomation
▪ The more advanced a control system is, so the more crucial may be the
contribution of the human operator.

27. What were you seeing?
What were you focused on?
What were you expecting to happen?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_A._Klein

28. What were you trying to achieve?
Were there multiple goals at the same
time?
Was time pressure?

29. Did you ask anyone for help? What
signal brought you to ask for support or
assistance? Were you able to contact
the people you needed to contact?

30. One. Dropped. Socket.
A. should have
B. should have never;
C. shouldn't have…
D. shouldn't have
E. shouldn't have punctured a hole in it.
“So many things that shouldn't have happened. There's
no one that thought that scenario out.”

31. “Should have” “Would not have happened”

32. Well facilitated debriefings support recalibration
of mental models of how things really work and
break (vs what is on the wiki).

33. Why did it make sense at the time?

34. What we knew, what surprised us?
Learning from other domains

35. Defenses and barriers have their own special way of
creating other problems. And they may never help in
the future.

36. Resilience
Ability to respond
Ability to monitor
Ability to anticipate
Ability to learn

37. http://www.adaptivecapacitylabs.com/blog/2018/03/23/moving-past-shallow-incident-data/

38. @allspaw
“I think the other incident is related”

39. Accountability means inviting everyone to tell their story,
their “account” then systematizing and distributing the
lessons in it, and using this to sponsor vicarious learning for
all

40. “…Look not at the individual pieces of
the event, but at the relationships
between those pieces.”

41. 1. Product
Owner
2. SWE
3. SRE
4. Human
Factors
$$
Product
Owner
SWE
Overwork/Burnout
Fall Asleep
SRE
Chaos Engineering
Accident boundaries
J. Rasmussen
Human Factors/Cognitive Systems Engineer
Helps us make sense of these boundaries,
Helps ”design for human use”

44. You are the culture. I am the culture.

45. “If there was to be a renewal, it
would take all of us and all parts
of each of us”
Satya Nadella

46. What will you do on Monday?
Read and Discuss with a colleague:
Etsy Debriefing Facilitation Guide http://bit.ly/fdebriefing
Hindsight to Insight http://bit.ly/hindsighttoinsight
Common Ground and Coordination in Joint Activity
http://bit.ly/commongroundandcoordination
The Ironies of Automation http://bit.ly/ironiesofautomation
The Stella Report https://stella.report
How Complex Systems Fail http://bit.ly/complexsystemsfail

47. Thank you!
Community of researchers and practitioners
@ri_cook
@allspaw
@bergstrom_johan
@sidneydekkercom@LauraMDMaguire
@caseyrosenthal
@nora_js
@jpaulreed