[awithrow]

I find the active voice makes it much more clear what is happening. But I do agree that assigning blame needs to be avoided so people are comfortable dissecting these issues. I think the key point is just removing names entirely. "An engineer introduced a bug" or "The on-call adjusted the setting". Having read through many a post-mortem, I cringe every time there is a section using the passive voice heavily. It conjures up an image of a cursed system where awful things descend from the heavens and the engineers are powerless to do anything about it.

Reading through a post-mortem with the active voice makes a much more clear picture to me. It becomes easier to understand the events that led to a problem. From there the key is to figure out "Why did the system not prevent this mistake".

[StavrosK]

Yeah, overusing this is awkward. The main point is not to assign blame, agreed.