Ask an engineering leader about their incident response protocol and they'll tell you about their severity scale. "The first thing we do is we assign a severity to the incident," they'll say, "so the right people will get notified." And this is sensible. In order to figure out whom to get involved, decision makers need…

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The post argues against the effectiveness of severity (SEV) scales in incident response, suggesting that complexity-based classification can offer better support. Using analogies like the Fujita scale for tornadoes, it points out that SEV scales often require time-consuming research and may not provide immediate actionable insights. Instead, the complexity-based Incident Command System (ICS) offers a more practical approach by focusing on the coordination and resources needed for different types of incidents.

Incident SEV scales are a waste of time

A complexity scale for software incidents