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The Postmortem Process: Review Meetings, Action Item Tracking and the Limits of Incident Metrics

The postmortem process means writing down in advance which incidents get a postmortem, running the draft through a review led by someone other than the author, and tracking action items with an owner, a date and a ticket; averages such as MTTR are mostly noise with few samples. We write the postmortem of Bookstore's tabletop, build a .NET tool that checks action items, and show that a 38 percent MTTM improvement appears 40 percent of the time even when nothing changes.