5 exercises — titles, UTC timelines, blameless root causes, "What Went Well", and SMART action items.
0 / 5 completed
1 / 5
Which post-mortem title follows professional conventions?
Post-mortem titles should be factual, structured, and blameless. The correct format includes: document type (Postmortem), a description of the event, date, severity, and impact. Option B hits all four. Option A is informal/humorous — inappropriate for an engineering document. Option C names an individual, violating blameless post-mortem principles. Option D reads like an informal Slack message, lacks structured metadata, and has no severity or date.
2 / 5
In the Timeline section of a post-mortem, which entry is written correctly?
Post-mortem timelines require UTC timestamps, specific events, and neutral language. Option B: uses UTC (not local time), is specific about what happened at each timestamp (deployment, alert threshold, severity declaration), and is written in factual past tense. Option A is vague (no exact time, "things started going wrong"). Option C uses local time and informal language ("really bad"). Option D uses "someone" (subtly blame-attributing) and "everything broke" (imprecise).
3 / 5
Choose the correct phrasing for a blameless root cause statement: "The outage _____ (occur) because the environment variable validation step _____ (not/run) on the production deployment pipeline, _____ (allow) a malformed DATABASE_URL to reach the application."
Past simple (occurred) for a completed incident event. Did not run (past simple negative) for the process failure — it describes a discrete event (the step was skipped). Allowing (present participle) introduces the consequence as a result clause — this is the standard English pattern for cause-consequence chains: "X happened, allowing Y to occur." Option C uses "had not run" (past perfect), which implies the skipping happened before another past event — that's overly complex here. Option D uses "was occurring" which implies the outage was ongoing at the time of writing.
4 / 5
You are writing the What Went Well section. Which entry belongs here?
The "What Went Well" section documents specific systems, processes, and practices that functioned as designed — so they can be reinforced. Option B names concrete things that worked: staffing, alerting latency, and runbook quality. Option A is vague ("quickly", "once they found out" — how quickly? when did they find out?). Option C attributes success to luck, not process — luck is not repeatable and shouldn't be treated as a strength. Option D is counterfactual speculation, not a documented strength.
5 / 5
Which action item from a post-mortem is correctly written?
Post-mortem action items must be specific, assigned to a named individual, and time-bound. Option B: describes the exact action (validate env vars in pipeline), names a specific owner (@priya), has a concrete due date (2024-03-26), and has a status field. Option A uses a team as owner (not an individual), and "soon" is not a deadline. Option C is hedged ("maybe", "think about", "some kind of", "future") — none of these are commitments. Option D is specific about the bug but doesn't name an owner or deadline.