Practice : Swarming on Issues
Purpose and Strategic Importance
Swarming is a collaborative practice where team members come together immediately to tackle an urgent issue, incident, or blocker. Rather than assigning a ticket to a single owner, the team collectively focuses on solving the problem in real time.
Swarming accelerates resolution, spreads knowledge, reduces context switching, and strengthens team cohesion. It transforms high-pressure moments into learning opportunities and reinforces a culture of shared responsibility and continuous improvement.
Description of the Practice
- A swarm is triggered when a critical bug, outage, or high-priority issue is detected.
- The team assembles quickly - often via a dedicated channel or call - and works together to understand, diagnose, and resolve the problem.
- Roles are loosely defined: a facilitator might guide flow, others investigate, document, or implement fixes.
- The swarm ends when the issue is resolved or clearly handed over with next steps.
- Debriefs and learning reviews follow to drive improvement.
How to Practise It (Playbook)
1. Getting Started
- Establish criteria for when to initiate a swarm (e.g. production incidents, blocked deploys).
- Set up communication channels or tooling (e.g. Slack, Teams, Zoom, virtual war rooms).
- Assign a facilitator role to guide the session and maintain structure.
- Document the problem, timeline, actions, and insights throughout the swarm.
2. Scaling and Maturing
- Create swarm protocols: communication etiquette, roles, documentation standards.
- Track swarm frequency, duration, and effectiveness.
- Integrate swarming into incident response and support playbooks.
- Use swarms for priority bugs, flaky tests, CI/CD failures, or deployment regressions.
- Encourage participation across disciplines - engineering, QA, product, SRE, and support.
3. Team Behaviours to Encourage
- Treat issues as shared responsibilities - no blaming or siloed handoffs.
- Prioritise speed and clarity over perfection during the swarm.
- Celebrate collaboration, curiosity, and fast feedback.
- Embrace post-swarm reviews as part of learning, not punishment.
4. Watch Out For…
- Swarms that drag on without structure or resolution.
- Lack of documentation, leading to repeated investigation or missed learning.
- Burnout from too-frequent or under-scoped swarming.
- Teams defaulting to swarming for all issues - reserve it for high-impact problems.
5. Signals of Success
- Critical issues are resolved faster with fewer handoffs.
- Knowledge is shared more broadly across the team.
- Swarming becomes a trusted, repeatable process - not chaos.
- Incident reviews improve team practice and reduce recurrence.
- Morale increases as teams collaborate under pressure with purpose.