The Bus Factor: How to Actually Find It and Fix It on Your Team

Short summary

Bus factor is a measurable business continuity metric, not just a cultural concept. The article provides practical methods to identify single points of failure through on-call patterns, PR review data, and direct conversations with team members. It offers a concrete checklist including bug reassignment, on-call rotation, mandatory PR reviews, and quarterly access audits to systematically reduce key-person risk.

• •Bus factor is quantifiable: ask who could operate each critical system if key people left
• •Identify risk via on-call patterns, PR review concentration, and junior engineer feedback
• •Fix with deliberate bug reassignment, on-call rotation, mandatory reviews, and quarterly access audits

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