How long do you spend talking about your burndown chart during your sprint retrospectives? Burndown charts tell you so much more than if you finished all the work in the sprint or not. From these charts, you can learn:

• How well your team is estimating story points

• How many injections occur during the sprint

• How well your team is breaking down tickets

• Bottlenecks in your team’s software development pipeline

We’ll walk through a few examples of burndown charts in this article and discuss what we can learn.

Planning is critical to running a successful War Game. One of the core goals is for the incident to feel real, so expect to spend 3-4x the amount of time planning the War Game as you spend running it.

In the first article of this series, we identified a few challenges of production incidents. They’re fast, filled with pressure, and are (hopefully) brand new failures. If the best-case scenario is a new failure (remember: repeated failures mean we never solved it the first time), how can we practice?

It’s 3 AM and your phone is ringing. There’s only one number you let ring through your Do Not Disturb settings. You open one eye and look at the first of 12 on-call notifications.

“Database down. Need help.”

It’s gonna be a long night.