Scalability Rules: 50 Principles for Scaling Web Sites

7. Learn from Your Mistakes

Research has long supported the position that we learn more from our failures than from our successes. But we can only truly learn from our failures if we foster an environment of open, honest communication and fold in lightweight processes that help us repeatedly learn and get the most from our mistakes and failures. Rather than emulate the world of politics, where failures are hidden from others and as a result bound to be repeated over time, we should strive to create an environment in which we share our failures as antipatterns to best practices. To be successful, we need to learn aggressively, rely on organizations like Quality Assurance (QA) appropriately, expect systems to fail, and design for those failures ...