Practices

What Are Practices?

While technical concepts like architecture, patterns, and testing strategies help us build quality software, practices are the team-level processes and behaviors that help us work together effectively and learn from our experiences.

Practices focus on the human and organizational aspects of software development:

• How teams collaborate to deliver software safely and reliably
• How we respond when things go wrong
• How we learn from both successes and failures
• How we improve our systems and processes over time

Why Practices Matter

Technical excellence alone isn't sufficient for successful software delivery. Even the most well-architected system can fail if:

• Teams don't have clear processes for responding to incidents
• Organizations don't learn from failures and repeat the same mistakes
• There's no psychological safety for honest discussion about what went wrong
• Knowledge isn't shared effectively across team members

Good practices create the foundation for:

• Continuous improvement - Learning from every incident and near-miss
• Team resilience - Building systems and processes that handle failures gracefully
• Blameless culture - Creating psychological safety for honest investigation
• Knowledge sharing - Ensuring insights from one incident benefit the entire organization

Current Practices

📋 Postmortems

Learn how to conduct blameless postmortem investigations that help teams learn from failures and build more resilient systems.

Postmortems are retrospective investigations performed after incidents to understand what happened, why it happened, and how to prevent similar issues in the future. At Synapse, we emphasize blameless postmortems that focus on systemic improvements rather than individual mistakes.

Key Topics:

• Blameless Culture - Creating psychological safety for honest investigation
• Formal Postmortems - Comprehensive analysis for critical incidents
• Informal Postmortems - Lightweight reviews for minor incidents
• Root Cause Analysis - Using techniques like "Five Whys" to find systemic issues
• Action Items - Turning lessons learned into concrete improvements

How Practices Relate to Other Concepts

Practices work alongside technical concepts:

• Architecture & Patterns define the structure of our systems
• Testing validates that our systems work as intended
• CI/CD automates the delivery pipeline
• Practices define how teams collaborate, learn, and improve

Together, these create a complete picture of professional software development.

Next Steps

Start with Postmortems to understand how we learn from incidents and build more resilient systems.