The Runbook Grade: A Self-Assessment for Quality

Score your runbooks on a 1-5 scale across five dimensions. The runbook that scores below 3 is technical debt; the one that scores 5 is rare.

The five dimensions

Specificity: vague vs concrete. 'Restart the service' (1) vs 'kubectl rollout restart deployment/api -n prod' (5).

Completeness: covers the symptom, the diagnosis, the action, the verification, the rollback. 1 if any are missing.

Currency: when was it last updated. Anything over 6 months is dated; anything over 12 months is suspect.

Author confidence: was it written by someone who has actually run it. 1 if author has not; 5 if author handles it routinely.

Test runs: has it been used recently. 1 if never; 5 if used in the last quarter.

What scores mean

5: a senior on-call could follow it cold. Few runbooks earn this.

3-4: usable with experience; junior on-call would need to ask questions.

1-2: dangerous to follow blindly. Update or retire.

What to do with low scores

Score < 3: cannot be referenced from a runbook link in a page. The on-call investigates from scratch.

Quarterly: lowest 5 scores get a refactor. Owners are assigned; deadlines are tracked.

Score must be earned, not claimed. Test runs are the most honest measure.