How Failure Can Improve Your Team and Product

In May, the Test in Production Meetup was held at Microsoft Reactor in San Francisco, focusing on how the culture of failure impacts teams testing in production. Ben Woskow, Engineering Manager at LaunchDarkly, discussed why failures are not exclusively negative events and how teams can learn from them to improve their products and strengthen as a unit. He emphasized that incidents are inevitable and should be managed responsibly with values such as knowing before customers do, escalating when necessary, recovering quickly, maintaining blamelessness during incidents, and ensuring no repeat of the same incident. Feature flags were highlighted as a powerful tool for resolving incidents without deploying any changes.