Four Steps to Creating Effective Game Day Tests - Shopify

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This post details best practices for creating and executing Game Day tests. It outlines a four-step process: 1. Listing all potential failure scenarios by collaborating with the team and stretching imagination, then whittling down the list based on impact vs. simulation difficulty. 2. Creating a series of controlled experiments by expressing expectations as testable hypotheses, detailing prerequisite steps, expected behaviors, and restoration steps in a spreadsheet. 3. Testing human systems by analyzing team communication and work distribution under pressure. 4. Addressing any gaps uncovered by annotating experiment results, determining root causes, and planning corrections, followed by a follow-up discussion and updates to incident response guidelines. It also provides additional resources for further reading on systemic failure, human coordination, and resilience engineering.