jargon

Architecture & practice·Risk, blast radius and change

nobody wrote runbooks until an on-call rotation made the same people carry the pager.

Forcing function

A constraint arranged so that the desirable behaviour becomes the path of least resistance. Making the team that writes a service operate it, making the build fail on a missing test, making the migration deadline real — each replaces an exhortation with a mechanism. It is a staple of staff-level argument because 'we should all be more careful' has never worked and everyone in the room knows it.

Commonly confused with