Learning from failure
Production failures can happen at any time in the product development process, from the first deployment to supporting a mature product. When these production failures happen, depending on the impact, they may adversely affect the value the customer sees and potentially ruin a business’s reputation.
Often, we don’t see the lessons offered by these production failures until the failures happen or afterward when reading about such failures happening to another organization (or even a competitor!).
We will examine a sample of such famous production failures, hoping to glean lessons through the benefit of hindsight. The following examples include the following:
- The rollout of
healthcare.gov
in 2013 - The Atlassian cloud outage in 2022
Other lessons will come from other sections in this chapter.
healthcare.gov (2013)
In 2010, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act became law in the USA. A key part of this law, colloquially...