Dev Tools · 1h ago
Pre-Mortem Ritual: Debug Your Plan Before It Fails
A pre-mortem is a structured exercise where engineers imagine a project has already failed and write the post-incident review in past tense. Research shows this prospective hindsight produces 25% more concrete reasoning than forward prediction. The author's 10-minute protocol generates failure modes, ranks them by impact, and forces countermeasures before shipping.
Meridian48 take
This is a practical, evidence-backed technique that many teams skip despite its low cost and high payoff for preventing preventable Sev-1 incidents.
pre-mortemengineering-practices