Guidance on performing retrospectives
In my career I’ve had to conduct a number of retrospectives. Ahead of them it already sucked, there was an outage at some point, customers were impacted, and it was our fault. Never was it solely on our underlying infrastructure provider (AWS or Heroku), nope the blame was on us and we’d failed in some way. And as soon as the incident was resolved, it wasn’t time to go home and decompress with a beer, it was time start the process of a retrospective.
Finding the motivation to get right back to work is tough, but not losing time is important. There is probably a lot out there on retrospectives, and in general I was well rehearsed at them. But since I’d not performed a large scale one in a few years I found myself rusty and thought it’d be good to share some of our process.