Taxonomy on Revelara

The Reliability Top 10, First Edition

Mon, 05 Oct 2026 08:00:00 -0700

When teams think about reliability, they usually think about how a lack of it wakes them up in the middle of the night. Many teams stay in that mode, examining their own incident history but unable to move toward a more proactive reliability posture. They have a list of how things have gone wrong for them in the past, but not an evidence-based set of factors to watch for. This list is a second reference: the ten conditions that show up most often across 1,287 public incidents from 139 organizations. Use it to look for the gaps your own history can’t show you. If you only have a few minutes, read the table and then skip to What to do with it.

Causal Factor Enumeration v1: The Full Catalog

Tue, 29 Sep 2026 09:00:00 -0700

This page lists every entry in the first edition of the catalog from Building a Causal Factor Enumeration for Reliability. That post covers the prior work, the method and the known limitations. This page is the reference. The Reliability Top 10 ranks ten of these entries by the number of public incidents each appears in.

Edition v1 · curated 2026-09-22 · 38 entries · 7 categories

How to read an entry

Each entry has an identifier, a name and a definition.

Building a Causal Factor Enumeration for Reliability

Tue, 29 Sep 2026 08:00:00 -0700

When someone asked what the “OWASP Top 10 for Reliability” was a couple of weeks ago in a forum I frequent, I was instantly intrigued by the question. It raised more questions than answers. What would the list consist of, but also why hasn’t one been created before? Is it because the act of ranking itself is bad (rankings do have a number of inherent problems), or is it something else? I could imagine all sorts of things, from bad data, to limited analysis. But I have a fair chunk of incident data, so I set off to learn something and figure out if the results might be interesting.