The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source

Learning from incidents (Interview)

Feb 4, 2022

This week, Nora Jones, Founder and CEO of Jeli, shares her insights from chaos engineering at Netflix and incident analysis at Slack. She emphasizes the importance of learning from incidents to improve team resilience. Nora discusses creating developer-centric tools and the emotional complexities of incident reviews. She explores knowledge silos, the balance between quantitative and qualitative insights, and the evolving role of incident analysts. Additionally, she reflects on how studying real-world incidents can enhance software practices and decision-making.

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ANECDOTE

From Chaos Engineering to Incident Analysis

Nora Jones's work at Netflix in chaos engineering revealed the potential of incident analysis.
This led to her role at Slack and eventually founding Jeli to help teams learn from incidents.

INSIGHT

Formalizing Incident Management

Formal incident management helps create a natural list of events for reflection, unlike ad-hoc approaches.
This formalized approach enables more structured learning and improvement.

INSIGHT

The Power of Incident Reviews

Writing incident reports and conducting thorough reviews reveal more than just public postmortems.
This in-depth analysis offers a greater return on investment from these often expensive events.

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This week we’re joined by Nora Jones, founder and CEO at Jeli where they help teams gain insight and learnings from incidents. Back in December Nora shared here thoughts in a Changelog post titled “Incident” shouldn’t be a four-letter word - which got a lot of attention from our readers. Today we’re talking with Nora about all things incidents — the learning and growth they represent for teams, why teams should focus on learning from incidents in the first place, their Howie guide to post‑incident investigations, why the next emerging role is an Incident Analyst, and she also shares a few book recommendations which we’ve linked up in the show notes.

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Featuring:

Nora Jones – LinkedIn, X
Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Jerod Santo – GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X

Show Notes:

Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!