Incident Postmortem QA Checklist

When to invoke

• After an outage or incident, to ensure the postmortem is complete and actionable.
• During incident review, to highlight gaps in timeline, detection, impact, and follow-ups.

Inputs needed

• Incident timeline as JSON events with timestamps and short descriptions.
• Optional metadata: service name, severity, start/end time, customer impact.

Workflow

1. Validate timeline ordering and detect gaps (large time jumps, missing end time).
2. Classify events into phases: detection, triage, mitigation, recovery, follow-up.
3. Generate a checklist covering:
   • Impact statement and affected users
   • Detection signals and alerting
   • Root cause evidence and contributing factors
   • What worked / what didn’t
   • Action items with owners and due dates
4. Flag common quality issues:
   • No customer impact quantification
   • No clear trigger/root cause evidence
   • Action items missing owner or due date

Output format

• JSON report:
  • checks[] list (id, status, rationale)
  • timeline_analysis (ordering, gaps)
  • missing_evidence[]

Guardrails

• Do not invent incident facts; only infer checklist gaps from provided inputs.
• If timeline is too sparse, default to “needs more detail” statuses.

Reference code

• incident_postmortem_qa_checklist.py reads timeline JSON and outputs checklist JSON.