{
  "schema": "vedokrok.public-item.v1",
  "release_id": "MHC-RPUB-20260920-75ad787a",
  "url": "/knowledge/mine-postmortems-for-repeated-failure-patterns",
  "id": "MHC-D-RESEARCH-0307",
  "version": "0.1.0",
  "title": "Mine postmortems for repeated failure patterns",
  "summary": "One postmortem explains an event. A set of postmortems can reveal a system.",
  "kind": "protocol",
  "body": "Periodically classify incidents by trigger, contributing conditions and affected system patterns using a small local taxonomy. Look for concentrations that justify a shared fix: deployment checks, interface design, capacity controls, observability or ownership. Keep the raw incidents visible so the categories do not become a substitute for reading the evidence.",
  "limits": [
    "Do not copy another organization's incident frequencies as your baseline or force every event into a convenient category."
  ],
  "topics": [
    "union-diagnostic-incident-work"
  ],
  "intents": [],
  "source_ids": [
    "RS-0EC41881FEFC935D"
  ],
  "evidence": [
    {
      "claim": "Google SRE uses consistent trigger and root-cause categories across postmortems to perform trend analysis and target systemic improvements.",
      "source_id": "RS-0EC41881FEFC935D",
      "role": "supports",
      "note": "Categories must fit the local system; Google's historical frequencies should not be copied as expected proportions elsewhere.",
      "locator": "Results of Postmortem Analysis"
    }
  ],
  "use_when": [
    "Individual incidents are being closed but similar failure modes keep returning under different names."
  ],
  "avoid_when": [
    "Do not copy another organization's incident frequencies as your baseline or force every event into a convenient category."
  ],
  "example": "Several unrelated outages may trace back to unsafe configuration rollout rather than three separate 'human errors.'",
  "check": "The analysis produces a cross-incident improvement target supported by identifiable incident records.",
  "steps": [
    "Choose a small set of locally meaningful trigger and contributing-factor categories.",
    "Classify a bounded period of postmortems consistently.",
    "Identify repeated patterns with enough examples to inspect.",
    "Create one systemic improvement hypothesis and test whether future incident data changes."
  ],
  "sources": [
    {
      "id": "RS-0EC41881FEFC935D",
      "title": "Results of Postmortem Analysis",
      "url": "https://sre.google/workbook/postmortem-analysis/"
    }
  ],
  "relations": [],
  "collections": [
    {
      "id": "RC-6F9B0E6D320D1467",
      "title": "Find the fault without making the incident harder to understand",
      "url": "/collections/find-the-fault-without-making-the-incident-harder-to-understand"
    }
  ]
}