Learn how to write and discuss post-incident reviews, post-mortems, and retrospectives in English — using blameless language, precise timelines, and constructive framing.
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What is the key principle of a 'blameless post-mortem'?
A blameless post-mortem focuses on what systemic conditions allowed the incident to happen — not which individual made a mistake. People make mistakes; the goal is to improve systems so the same mistake cannot happen again.
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Which sentence uses blameless language correctly in a post-mortem?
Blameless language describes the system failure: 'the deployment pipeline did not prevent...' focuses on the systemic gap (missing validation) rather than individual blame.
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What does 'contributing factor' mean in a post-mortem?
A contributing factor is a condition that made the incident worse or harder to resolve, without being the primary root cause. Example: 'Incomplete runbook documentation was a contributing factor that delayed the response.'
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In a post-mortem timeline, which format is clearest?
Post-mortem timelines must use precise UTC timestamps, describe what was observed and by whom, and name the specific system or service affected. Vague times like 'around lunchtime' are useless across timezones.
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What does 'MTTR' stand for and what does it measure?
MTTR (Mean Time To Recover or Resolve) measures how long it takes on average to restore service after an incident begins. A lower MTTR indicates a more resilient and well-practiced incident response process.
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Which phrase best introduces the 'action items' section of a post-mortem?
'To prevent recurrence, we will:' is the standard professional framing. Action items should be specific, assigned to an owner, and have a target date. This phrase frames them as preventative, forward-looking commitments.
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What is the difference between 'immediate mitigation' and 'long-term remediation' in a post-mortem?
Mitigation is the fast action taken during the incident to restore service (e.g. rollback, feature flag off, manual override). Remediation is the deeper fix that prevents the root cause from occurring again (e.g. automated config validation, improved monitoring).
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Which sentence uses appropriate hedging in a root cause analysis?
Good root cause writing uses hedging ('we believe', 'based on the evidence') while citing specific evidence (metrics, timewindow). This is honest about the limits of the investigation without being uselessly vague.
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What does 'five whys' mean as a post-mortem technique?
'Five whys' is a root cause analysis technique: you start with the symptom and ask 'why?' repeatedly (typically ~5 times) until you reach the underlying systemic cause. Developed by Toyota's Taiichi Ohno, widely used in SRE post-mortems.
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What does 'incident severity' (SEV1–SEV5) describe?
Severity levels (SEV1–SEV5, or P1–P5) classify an incident by its impact and urgency. SEV1 typically means complete service outage or critical data loss; SEV5 is a minor cosmetic issue. Severity determines escalation, response team size, and communication frequency.