Meaningful RCAs: Process not individuals

I’m currently writing about RCAs in a series of posts. If you aren’t familiar with them, check out my Meaningful RCAs page first.

One of the key things that I would emphasise before every RCA is that there needs to be either zero blame or full org blame. As I’ve written before, it takes a team to ship a bug, and the reason why we have refinement, unit tests, static analysis tools, code review and hands on testing is to catch such issues. If one person can truly be responsible for shipping a bug – that is your problem.

So why is it important that we have an open safe space and zero blame culture? Well if we want to truly tap into what happened and understand the chain of decisions that led to a mistake, we need to be able to talk about them. If people fear repercussions then how can they be expected to be open and honest? Whether that is disciplinary or more likely, just the social awkwardness of having your mistakes discussed.

However mistakes are part of software development and they will always occur. Tools & processes help us reduce the likelihood. We have our ways of working to help us build software correctly but they will sometimes have gaps or fail us. Sometimes that is fine. Shit happens. Bugs will happen. Sometimes we just need to accept this. But other times we can understand why something failed and improve it.

To help with this I like to share a little blurb at the start. I’ll joke about it requiring a team. I’ll make a point that this isn’t about blaming anyone and mistakes will happen. It is that mix of people, process and tools. Fixing the fallibility of human nature isn’t possible but fixing processes & improving tool usage is.

I also have about 17 years experience in a variety of different roles and experience of screwing up in a variety of exciting and new ways. I’m not ashamed of having made many mistakes down my career – it is natural – and if sharing that makes it a more open & safe space.

So when you’re running your RCA, or in the invite, share that it is zero blame. Share that we’re it is the process that we are interested in.