Atlassian has added a postmortem functionality to its recently released Jira Ops, to help teams in the company’s toolchain learn from mistakes and avoid finger pointing when things go awry.

The addition comes just at the right time, since incident postmortems are gaining traction in agile environments.

Teams will try to identify root causes of incidents by looking into key events, analyse them and then come up with actions.

Concentrating on the contributing factors can help keep discussions focussed on fixing the issue and avoid finger pointing. Postmortems can also help transparency in DevOps, which organisations such as Netflix, Monzo, and TravisCI have demonstrated works time and again.

Getting all the necessary information, though, can be daunting – and this is where Atlassian’s new offering comes in. Once an incident is marked as resolved, Jira Ops users are now prompted to start a postmortem document in Atlassian’s Confluence so some form of documentation can start to be built that serves as the basis of future discussion.

To make it as useful as possible, Jira Ops includes a template with the key aspects necessary to analyse an incident including summary, analysis, root causes, lessons learned and actions.

The tool also compiles a timeline with information – such as timestamps from events like status changes, alerts and manual updates – that can be pulled from different tools like Slack.

Once everything is completed, the team can turn agreed-upon actions into Jira via a “Create Jira issue” button. The system will then track whether root causes have been settled or whether further actions are necessary to prevent future incidents.