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A Failure to Communicate

Welcome

I had an interesting discussion with my colleagues at work a few days ago that led to the question, "How do you document failure?" The discussion led us to the conclusion that failures aren't widely documented. They should be. Think about it. When you search for a solution to a problem, you want an answer that worked for someone else. You probably don't care about what didn't work or the trial and error process of solving the problem – you only want to know about the successful solution. Whoever said, "Those who don't know history are destined to repeat it," was a genius. That person understood, intuitively perhaps, that documenting your failures is a wise choice.

Applying this to system administration, or any technology job, is easy. Quite possibly, you also tend to document only what works; so when you search your own knowledge bases, you find successful outcomes. However, when you're faced with a "new" problem, how do you go about resolving it? If you're like everyone else since humans first walked upright, you fail until you succeed. How do you know what not to try next time? You don't know because most of us don't document our failures.

I've had many experiences of consulting a senior-level coworker about a particular problem only to hear, "We tried that, and it didn't work." And I didn't just hear it once. That sentence should have been on a loop that someone played for me every time I walked into their cubicle. How do I know you really tried it? How do I know you're not guessing that it won't work? I'm from a time and place that makes me require proof rather than just take someone's word for something, so because of who I am, I will try all the same things that failed before eventually coming up with a common solution. Why? Because no one documented their failures.

If I could see a list of things that failed, I would be convinced that they didn't work, especially if some explanation was also