Troubleshooting without losing common ground
Common ground, an important concept in recent teamwork research, helps us understand why collaborative troubleshooting breaks down over time, leading to wasted effort and mistakes. Drawing on common ground as well as some ideas from medical diagnosis, Dan Slimmon demonstrates that by extending ChatOps, we can make troubleshooting much easier without losing the benefits of fluid team conversation.
| Talk Title | Troubleshooting without losing common ground |
| Speakers | Dan Slimmon (Exosite) |
| Conference | Velocity |
| Conf Tag | Build resilient systems at scale |
| Location | Santa Clara, California |
| Date | June 21-23, 2016 |
| URL | Talk Page |
| Slides | Talk Slides |
| Video | |
You work on a team that fixes complex systems under time pressure. Your teammates have different skill sets, different priorities, and different levels of expertise. But you all have to troubleshoot and solve problems together. This is very hard to do effectively. Fortunately for the relatively new domain of DevOps, situations like these have been studied extensively over the last couple decades, and we can use the results of this research to inform our own processes and automation for troubleshooting. Common ground, an important concept in recent teamwork research, helps us understand why collaborative troubleshooting breaks down over time, leading to wasted effort and mistakes. Drawing on common ground as well as some ideas from medical diagnosis, Dan Slimmon demonstrates that by extending ChatOps, we can make troubleshooting much easier without losing the benefits of fluid team conversation. Dan discusses differential diagnosis—a formalized reasoning process used by doctors to diagnose complicated problems—and shows off a little automation that sits at the intersection of these two theoretical frameworks that can make team troubleshooting much more effective.
