17 March 2026
Pipeline stages that hide recovery delay
Mean time to recovery can look respectable while engineers still burn evenings waiting for a promotion job that only one person can approve. Those minutes rarely appear in the alert timeline because the service already looks “handled.”
Walk a recent incident through every gate after the fix commit: who can merge, who can promote, which environments must stay green, and which freeze calendars still apply. Write the actual clock times beside each gate.
In several reviews near Pyeongtaek manufacturing clients, the longest gate was a shared staging lock held by another product line. The fix itself took twenty minutes; the lock added two hours.
Ownership fixes beat tooling swaps here. Name a backup approver, document the freeze exceptions for genuine incidents, and rehearse a rollback that does not depend on the same locked path.