Policy Name: Zero OOPS Policy
Policy Owner: Francis Lacoste
Parent Process/Activity: None
Supported Policy: None
Policy Overview
In a nutshell, this policy is about moving the tolerance-level for OOPSes to zero. This mean that any user-visible error happening in production is a stop-the-line event and should be fixed ASAP.
The burndown charts are now private, sadly: https://lpstats.canonical.com/graphs/LPQA/ https://lpstats.canonical.com/graphs/LPQAByTeam/
Why this policy?
We should be proud of the service we build and deliver, and we cannot take pride in a low-quality product. Everytime an OOPS page reaches a user, whether because of a time out or an unhandled exception, we failed on the measure of quality. An OOPS page means that a user was prevented from completing their work, that's really bad.
Having zero tolerance for OOPSes in production means that we are putting actions behind our mantra of quality. An OOPS is basically an escaped defect, and we cannot tolerate that.
Daily we have between tens and hundreds of OOPS. This policy is basically about making sure that the Exceptions and Timeouts section of the report are empty.
What should be done about OOPSes
- Everytime an OOPS is encountered in production, a bug should be filed for it with priority of Critical. It should be tagged with either 'oops' or 'timeout' on it.
- Fixing critical bugs takes priority over all other bug fixing work (done by the interrupt squads).
- We should deploy all possible OOPS fix to production as rapidly as possible.
Once we achieve Zero-OOPS status:
- Do root-cause analysis for every OOPS that occurs in production, to ensure that our process is really robust against escaped defects.
But All OOPSes are not equals
All OOPSes in the "Exceptions" and "Time outs" sections should be eliminated. If an OOPS isn't important - because it's only triggered by robots, or for whatever reason, then it shouldn't record an OOPS.
One way to prevent an OOPS being visible is to change the exception type so that it doesn't trigger the OOPS code, or to change the oops-tools filtering to filter out that particular code.
The end-goal is that the users don't get the BSOD pages and that the OOPS report sections are empty. So that when something appears there, we know it's a problem to fix. No sifting through many false positives.
When
We are starting this policy now.
Coming Soon
Burn down chart of the bugs with the "oops" and "timeout" tags.