War Gaming for Training

Like the idea, we never made it formal, but tested the concept driven by competition.

Is your team’s new engineer ready to take on-call? Use wargames for training  By  Jeffrey Starr

At Qualtrics, our engineering organization is expanding rapidly. For my team, Text Analytics, we’ve gone from four to eight members in less than six months and there are more coming. As team members come in, part of the on-boarding process is preparing them to take on-call. The on-call engineer is the first responder for incidents — responsible for either resolving the issue or escalating the issue if they need help. Culturally, we’ve decided that teams are responsible for the systems they build to promote ownership and solving of maintainability issues.

To be ready for on-call rotation, a team member must:

- be familiar with our processes,
- have certain accounts, permissions, and tools, and
- be competent to diagnose and correct problems in our tech stack. .... "