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Standard : Learnings from incidents are turned into engineering improvements

Purpose and Strategic Importance

This standard ensures that lessons from incidents are not lost but actively drive engineering improvements. It turns short-term recovery into long-term resilience, helping teams build better systems through continuous learning.

Aligned to our "Post-Incident Learning Culture" policy, this standard fosters accountability, strengthens feedback loops, and prevents recurrence. Without it, incidents repeat, trust erodes, and opportunities to grow are missed.

Strategic Impact

Clearly defined impacts of meeting this standard include improved delivery flow, reduced risk, higher system resilience, and better alignment to business needs. Over time, teams will see reduced rework, faster time to value, and stronger system integrity.

Risks of Not Having This Standard

  • Reduced ability to respond to change or failure
  • Accumulation of technical debt or friction
  • Poor developer experience and morale
  • Decreased confidence in releases and features
  • Misalignment between technical implementation and business priorities

CMMI Maturity Model

  • Level 1 – Initial: Action items from incidents are rarely completed or tracked.

  • Level 2 – Managed: Some insights are captured, but improvements are ad hoc.

  • Level 3 – Defined: Post-incident insights are prioritised, tracked, and implemented consistently.

  • Level 4 – Quantitatively Managed: Themes are analysed across incidents to drive strategic improvements.

  • Level 5 – Optimising: Continuous learning from failure drives systemic change across architecture, process, and culture.


Key Measures

  • Adoption metrics relevant to the standard (to be defined)
  • Quality, throughput, and system health metrics aligned to capability
  • Maturity scores based on structured assessment
Associated Policies
  • Post-Incident Learning Culture
Associated Practices
  • Root Cause Analysis (RCA)
  • Blameless Postmortems
  • Behaviour-Driven Development (BDD)
  • Contract Testing
  • End-to-End (E2E) Testing
  • Exploratory Testing
  • Integration Testing
  • Mutation Testing
  • Non-functional Requirement Testing
  • Test-Driven Development (TDD)
  • Visual Regression Testing
Associated Measures
  • Postmortem Action Completion Rate

Technical debt is like junk food - easy now, painful later.

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