Release It!, 2nd Edition

Disaster Simulations

Chaos isn’t always about faults in the software. Things happen to people in our organizations, too. Every single person in your organization is mortal and fallible. People get sick. They break bones. They have family emergencies. Sometimes they just quit without notice. Natural disasters can even make a building or an entire city inaccessible. What happens when your single point of failure goes home every evening?

High-reliability organizations use drills and simulations to find the same kind of systemic weaknesses in their human side as in the software side.

In the large, this may be a “business continuity” exercise, where a large portion of the whole company is involved. It’s possible to run these at smaller scales. ...