Release Incident Postmortem

Use this skill when the incident is over and the focus is structured learning, not live triage.

Trigger Conditions

Use this skill when:

• an outage, regression, or release incident has already been mitigated
• the team needs a postmortem document with timeline and root-cause analysis
• follow-up actions, owners, and prevention work need to be captured
• a release-related incident requires a learning record beyond a chat summary

Do not use this skill while an incident is still active or when root cause is still unknown.

Workflow

1. Confirm the incident is mitigated and stable.
2. Reconstruct the timeline using available evidence.
3. Summarize user-visible impact and scope.
4. Identify root cause and contributing factors.
5. Capture mitigation steps actually taken.
6. Define concrete follow-up actions, owners, and verification.

Output

For non-trivial work, provide:

• timeline summary
• impact and scope
• root cause and contributing factors
• mitigation actions taken
• follow-up actions with owners
• recommended preventive changes

Coordination

After postmortem drafting:

• use docs-writer to publish the postmortem and any external comms
• use release-rollout-strategy if rollout shape needs to change for prevention
• use systematic-debugging only if root cause turns out to still be unclear

Invocation Examples

• "Use release-incident-postmortem from dev-workflow-kit to run a structured postmortem on this outage."
• "Use release-incident-postmortem to capture timeline, impact, and follow-up actions for last night's incident."
• "Use release-incident-postmortem to write the retrospective doc now that mitigation is complete."