So-called “Murder Boards” have a long history in politics and military operations, but they actually started at NASA as part of the engineering process. This talk revisits the format and its practical applications in software engineering. What is the psychology around them? How do we know when “murder” is appropriate? How do murder boards differ from more traditional structures like code review, pre-mortems and retrospectives? Sometimes murder really is the best way to get through a hard problem.
Marianne Bellotti is a software engineer who specializes in restoring legacy systems to operational excellence. She's the author of the bestselling book on the topic: Kill It With Fire. As part of United States Digital Service she responded to incidents at the State Department, the IRS, the Department of Defense, among others. Prior to federal service she worked for the United Nations on data shar...