Issues with postmortems in JIRA Ops

[Reiss Snooks]

So with the recently announced Postmortems function in JIRA Ops I was incredibly happy... until I tried it. (If you're not sure what I'm on about, check it out here: https://www.atlassian.com/blog/announcements/announcing-postmortems-jira-ops)

Many obvious functions here are bugged or not working as intended/advertised.

For example:

• Creating a postmortem but leaving it in a Draft state in Confluence means the issue itself no longer shows up as "pending postmortem" which it clearly should be as the postmortem hasn't been completed.
• Draft postmortems do not show within the main postmortem page within Confluence.
• The "option" to require a postmortem (as per the introduction video) does not exist.

Because of these 3 glaringly obvious issues, it makes it impossible to enforce postmortems are not only completed but actually to track those which are not completed.

[Matt Ryall]

Hi Reiss,

Thanks for trying out Jira Ops postmortems and sharing your feedback.

You're right that a postmortem still in draft in Confluence means the incident is no longer shown as pending in Jira Ops. This was an oversight in how we track the status of the Confluence page, and I've raised it as a bug at JOPSCLOUD-143. Our engineers have looked into this, and unfortunately it may take us a few weeks to fix as the page status information is challenging to retrieve in bulk. Please follow the issue for updates. 

The second issue is also a valid concern, but represents a limitation of the page properties report in Confluence, which only shows published pages (like many other features in Confluence). We're planning a new top-level Postmortems view in Jira Ops that will show both draft and published postmortems in a consolidated list to address this problem. This should arrive early next year.

The mention in the video to "require postmortems" is referring to the skip/require postmortem toggle, where the menu item varies between "skip postmortem" or "require postmortem". Require in this case is more like "unskip" - do you think we should rename it?

… it makes it impossible to enforce postmortems are not only completed but actually to track those which are not completed.

What level of enforcement or encouragement for postmortems would you like to have in your team?

Our initial goal was to provide tracking information so teams can self-organize and complete their postmortems. However, if you think features like reminder emails or other more "enforced" requirements would be good, please let us know.

Regards,
Matt

[Reiss Snooks]

Hi Matt,

Thanks for raising this as a bug and for addressing those concerns.

For us - getting postmortems completed in the first place is considered a chore by many of those that need to do so. Therefore enforcing some kind of sub-state where you have Resolved and then Closed would be good.

That way we can resolve a major incident because the issue has been fixed, but have some logic to say it cannot be changed to closed until a postmortem has been created and completed.

Then we can have a queue that shows "resolved but not closed" to determine which major incidents still have postmortems pending completion.

I hope that makes sense?