{"id":11714,"date":"2022-11-29T09:14:21","date_gmt":"2022-11-29T09:14:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ee.yelkdev.site\/?p=11714"},"modified":"2024-12-09T13:16:31","modified_gmt":"2024-12-09T13:16:31","slug":"chaos-day-learning-analysis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.equalexperts.com\/blog\/tech-focus\/chaos-day-learning-analysis\/","title":{"rendered":"How to capture learning from a Chaos Day"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Chaos engineering helps your organisation to answer fundamental questions about how your services perform when unexpected events occur. Does the service operate normally during traffic surges, or if there\u2019s a single point of failure that crashes an app, or a network connection?<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/playbooks.equalexperts.com\/chaos-day-playbook\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Read the full playbook<\/a><\/p>\n<p>However, it\u2019s critical to plan your <a href=\"https:\/\/www.equalexperts.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/08\/chaosday_playbook_v1.0.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Chaos Day<\/a> so that these answers are captured <a href=\"https:\/\/playbooks.equalexperts.com\/chaos-day-playbook\/how\/what-experiments-to-run-on-a-chaos-day\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">during experiments<\/a>, shared with your team in the immediate aftermath of the Chaos Day, and that knowledge applied to your systems and processes to <a href=\"https:\/\/playbooks.equalexperts.com\/chaos-day-playbook\/how\/learning-from-a-chaos-day\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">make improvements<\/a> and build system resilience.<\/p>\n<h2>The day after the Chaos Day<\/h2>\n<p>It\u2019s wise to allow people 24 hours after a Chaos Day to \u2018wind down\u2019 and think about the experience. Then it\u2019s time to hold a post-mortem style retrospective where the team can analyse what happened.<\/p>\n<p>Some great resources for holding such retrospectives include:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li aria-level=\"1\"><a href=\"https:\/\/extfiles.etsy.com\/DebriefingFacilitationGuide.pdf\">Etsy\u2019s facilitation guide<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li aria-level=\"1\"><a href=\"https:\/\/sre.google\/sre-book\/postmortem-culture\/\">Google\u2019s SRE handbook<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li aria-level=\"1\">Jeli.io&#8217;s<a href=\"https:\/\/www.jeli.io\/blog\/what-is-incident-analysis-and-why-should-we-do-it\/\"> incident review guide<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>If several teams were involved in the Chaos Day, ask each team to run their own Chaos retrospective, then feed their top insights into a team-of-teams retrospective.<\/p>\n<h2>What happens in a chaos retrospective?<\/h2>\n<p>Remember, the purpose of a chaos retrospective is to capture learning and identify improvements that can be applied to your systems.<\/p>\n<p>We recommend involving the whole team in the Chaos retrospective, not just agents of chaos and responders. Split the time into sections (or separate meetings) that focus on the following:<\/p>\n<h2>What did we learn from the experiments?<\/h2>\n<p>For each experiment, consider what the activity logs reveal about system behaviour, focusing on new knowledge, rather than just creating a long list of improvement tasks. If ideas for improvement do come up, assign someone to review these ideas later. Similarly, don\u2019t get distracted by trying to \u2018solve\u2019 every issue, because the focus of the retrospective is on documenting learning from the chaos day, not solving each specific problem.<\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s important to create reviews that are thorough and encourage transparency, which means avoiding any \u2018blame\u2019 for a failure on an individual\u2019s actions. Instead, for each action, consider:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li aria-level=\"1\">What happened?<\/li>\n<li aria-level=\"1\">What was the impact on system performance?<\/li>\n<li aria-level=\"1\">Why did this occur?<\/li>\n<li aria-level=\"1\">What can we learn from this?<\/li>\n<li aria-level=\"1\">How could we prevent this failure in future?<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h2>How do we improve future Chaos Days?<\/h2>\n<p>Spend the final ten minutes of the meeting noting the success of the Chaos Day itself. Note down what changes you could make to improve future Chaos Days.<\/p>\n<h2>What improvement considerations\/ideas should be added to the team backlog?<\/h2>\n<p>The most important aspect of post-Chaos Day learning is to prioritise fixing the findings of the Chaos Day over developing new features. Ensure that senior stakeholders are committing to applying improvements identified by the Chaos Day, and assign improvement ideas to a specific member of the team.<\/p>\n<h2>Share the knowledge<\/h2>\n<p>Chaos Days can offer important insights and learning well beyond your immediate team. However, it\u2019s important to note that not all stakeholders will be interested in the technical aspects of experiments and performance logs. After a retrospective meeting, capture the knowledge and share it in a form that is accessible to the wider organisation.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.equalexperts.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/08\/chaosday_playbook_v1.0.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Download our Chaos Day playbook in pdf<\/a><\/p>\n<p>You should make this knowledge easy for other teams to find and consume. Consider writing publically about what you\u2019ve done and learnt on an internal blog or platform such as Slack. Chaos engineering is still in its infancy in the software engineering discipline and making experience reports public will help this important practice mature.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Successfully completing a Chaos Day is only part of the story. How can organisations ensure they capture, understand and apply the knowledge gained from chaos engineering? Here are our top tips.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":29,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"content-type":"","inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[302,305],"location":[397],"class_list":["post-11714","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tech-focus","tag-chaos-day","tag-chaos-day-playbook"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v25.9 (Yoast SEO v25.9) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>How to capture learning from a Chaos Day | Equal Experts<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"So you survived your Chaos Day - what happens next? 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