13 Chaos engineering (for) people

This chapter covers

• Mindset shifts required for effective chaos engineering
• Getting buy-in from the team and management for doing chaos engineering
• Applying chaos engineering to teams to make them more reliable

Let’s focus on the other type of resource that’s necessary for any project to succeed: people. In many ways, human beings and the networks we form are more complex, dynamic, and harder to diagnose and debug than the software we write. Talking about chaos engineering without including all that human complexity would therefore be incomplete.

In this chapter, I would like to bring to your attention three facets of chaos engineering meeting human brains.

• First, we’ll discuss what kind of mindset is required to be an effective chaos engineer, and why sometimes that shift is hard to make.
• Second is the hurdle to get a buy-in from the people around you. We will see how to communicate clearly the benefits of this approach.
• Finally, we’ll talk about human teams as distributed systems and how we can apply the same chaos engineering approach we did with machines to make teams more resilient.

If that sounds like your idea of fun, we can be friends. First stop: the chaos engineering mindset.