The One With Freak Incidents

We had a bit of a freak incident today. One user profile was very weirdly broken in several places and all applications had problems with it, but nobody could where the problem was coming from and that other teams were also affected. We talked about what we could see from the problem with the QA from another team and then both our QAs went into some further investigation together, and we knew that we had to update a third team about our findings.

By sheer luck I went into another team’s Around room before my lunch break to have a bit of a chat and noticed that the ID they were looking in their screenshare with a dev from the second team looked familiar. Their problem looked completely different from ours but we decided it was best to look at it together with everyone involved instead of teams of 2. So we went to our general dev channel and gathered everyone and solved the issue pretty quickly, having all the information needed from all teams involved.

I wonder how things like this can be solved without this case of luck (or my need to chat to other people a lot), because it wasn’t one of those “this is a general incident, why did we not coordinate efforts?” things because it looked so isolated to everyone. I guess that’s just where the human interaction comes in handy and we should be happy we still have that in some form.