What should a game incident postmortem include?

What happened, what caused it, how you responded, and what you'll change to prevent a repeat, kept blameless (focused on systems and process, not fault). It can be lightweight: even a paragraph like "this update caused a crash spike because we didn't test X; we'll add X to the checklist" is a real postmortem. Incident data (timing, version, affected devices) gives it an accurate factual basis.

Should I do a postmortem for every bug?

No, reserve postmortems for significant incidents: outages, bad releases, major bugs, anything that did real damage or revealed a process gap. For those, the learning is worth the small effort. For minor, routine bugs there's usually no systemic lesson to capture, so a postmortem would be overhead with little payoff, just fix it and move on. Impact data helps you judge which incidents qualify.

Do I Need a Postmortem After an Incident?

Quick answer: For significant incidents, yes, a lightweight one. A postmortem captures what happened, why, and how to prevent it, turning a painful incident into lasting improvement. It needn't be formal; even a few honest notes prevent repeating the same mistake.

A postmortem is a review after an incident, an outage, a bad update, a major bug, examining what happened and how to do better. Do you need one? For significant incidents, yes, because the value isn't ceremony but learning, and a postmortem is how an incident's pain becomes future prevention.

Postmortems Turn Pain Into Prevention

An incident is expensive, downtime, churn, stress, and a postmortem is how you get a return on that cost: by learning enough to prevent a repeat. Without one, you fix the immediate problem but miss the systemic lesson, and you're likely to hit the same class of incident again. The postmortem extracts the lasting value.

Bugnet's data, what happened, when, on which version, across which devices, gives you the factual basis for an accurate postmortem. The goal is to understand the incident well enough that the same thing can't easily happen twice.

Keep It Lightweight and Blameless

A postmortem doesn't need to be a formal heavy document, especially for a small team. A few honest notes suffice: what happened, what caused it, how you responded, and what you'll change. And keep it blameless, focused on systems and process, not fault, so the lessons are about prevention rather than punishment.

Even a paragraph capturing "this update caused a crash spike because we didn't test X; we'll add X to the checklist" is a real postmortem. The discipline of writing it down is what turns a vague memory into an actual process improvement.

Reserve Them for Significant Incidents

You don't need a postmortem for every minor bug, that would be overhead with little payoff. Reserve them for significant incidents: outages, bad releases, major bugs, anything that did real damage or revealed a process gap. For these, the learning is worth the small effort; for trivia, just fix it and move on.

Bugnet's impact data helps you judge which incidents were significant enough to warrant a review. So: yes, do a lightweight, blameless postmortem after significant incidents, it turns a painful event into lasting prevention, but skip the ceremony for minor bugs where there's no systemic lesson to capture.

Yes, for significant incidents, a lightweight, blameless one. It turns a painful incident into lasting prevention. Skip the ceremony for minor bugs with no systemic lesson.