Games We Play to Improve on Incident Response
summary
Argues that deliberate play and drills shorten MTTR by training concrete skills and shows which games map to which deficits: Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes for precise verbalization, Overcooked for delegation and coordination, tabletop exercises and staged fire drills for runbook validation, chaos testing (Gremlin, Netflix practices) for resilience, and proposes an incident response simulator as a research prototype that sits between generic games and full gamedays while OpsDrill.com provides practical runbook templates.
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chapters (30)
- 0:00Improving incident response
- 1:16Speaker intro
- 2:38Prerequisites for incident management
- 4:00Human skills for resilience
- 6:26Psychological safety and team cohesion
- 8:13Technical and communication skills
- 10:41Skills for incident commanders
- 13:07Domain knowledge and docs
- 14:10Why incident management matters
- 15:35Anti-patterns in incident response
- 18:05Games to grow SRE/DevOps culture
- 22:20Maslow’s hierarchy for incident games
- 23:24Party games for trust and safety
- 25:10Party games for team bonding
- 27:20Asymmetrical co-op games for communication
- 28:02Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes
- 30:09Role-based co-op games
- 30:51Overcooked for leadership
- 32:19Ops drills for incident skills
- 33:02Tabletop exercises
- 35:08Benefits and limits of tabletop exercises
- 38:01Fire drills for realistic practice
- 38:21Fire drills with run books
- 39:04Intentional system failures
- 40:07Chaos testing as disciplined drills
- 41:10Chaos testing for automation roadmaps
- 41:31Game days for production testing
- 42:14Game days at Amazon
- 44:23Summary for remote teams
- 45:05Closing remarks
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