How a Culture of Failure Can Make Your Dev Team Stronger

In a recent talk at the Bay Area Test in Production Meetup, Ben Woskow emphasized that nothing in software development is perfect or invulnerable. He highlighted the inevitability of failure and encouraged teams to adopt a blameless culture, where they learn from mistakes rather than assign blame. This approach helps organizations reduce costly outages and recover from incidents faster. A blameless culture promotes teamwork, trust, and shared knowledge, which can lead to better incident response and recovery processes. Designing for failure involves monitoring, observability, alerting, response and recovery plans, considering customer impact, focusing on teams rather than individuals, and continuously improving processes and systems based on learnings from failures.