Postmortems

When mentioning postmortems, I’m typically talking within the context of Site Reliability Engineering or Resilience Engineering work, not the autopsy process that is carried out in a mortuary (though that is where the name comes from).

In these fields, postmortems are commonly made after an outage to gain an understanding of what caused the failure, to learn from the incident and to document this for communication to stakeholders (see post-incident review).

There are a few aspects to the name “postmortem” that I disagree with. Perform a post-incident review instead of a postmortem.