Descriptive engineering: not just for post-mortems
Prescriptive engineering is when you say, “What are we going to build, and how?”, and then you execute your plan. Teams with strong prescriptive engineering capabilities can deliver high-quality features fast. And that is, of course, indispensable.
But prescriptive engineering is not enough. As surprises emerge, we need to spot them, understand them, and explain them. We need to practice descriptive engineering.
I see this as basically reliability engineering, but perhaps the advantage of Descriptive Engineering as a new term is that it reframes SRE work as the job of all engineers.