PyCon 2019 in Cleveland, Ohio

Sunday 1:50 p.m.–2:20 p.m. in Grand Ballroom B

Lowering the Stakes of Failure with Pre-mortems and Post-mortems

Liz Sander

Description

Failure can be scary. There are real costs to a company and its users when software crashes, models are inaccurate, or when systems go down. The emotional stakes feel high-- no one wants to be responsible for a failure. We can lower the stakes by creating spaces to learn from failures, and minimize their impact. This talk introduces two ways to address failure: blameless post-mortems, to learn from an incident; and pre-mortems, to identify modes of failure upfront.