Blameless RCA for incidents

RCA can be defined as a systematic method to uncover the fundamental cause of an incident through a series of “why?” questions until no further diagnostic information can be extracted. The most important part of conducting an RCA is being blameless. In this section, we shall learn how to create a blameless RCA for incidents that would help in creating a strong and healthy engineering culture in the team during RCAs.

Let us learn about a few important pointers that can help us create a blameless RCA:

• Focus on what went well during the incident: Highlighting the positive points that went well during the incident gives more confidence to the team. Thank the on-call engineers who responded to the incident and did the firefighting.
• Focus on the future: Do not focus on what could’ve happened, should’ve happened, or any past events. Rather, focus on what actions we can take to improve for next time or avoid it happening...