6 Best Practices for Software Development with Mattermost Mattermost Playbooks are templated, collaborative checklists with built-in automation and integration with third-party tools that a team can follow over and over. Every step and required action of a process is documented and prescribed by the playbook for consistency and repeatability. A `run` of a Playbook includes a checklist with task assignments, depen - dencies, notifications, and integrated automations, as well as an associated Mattermost channel. Once the run has finished, Playbooks offers integrated retrospectives, reports and a timeline of everything that happened. Playbooks support transparency within and between teams because stakeholders can observe the channel conversation side-by-side with the checklist while the run is in prog - ress, or review the timeline and retrospective afterwards. They also support short feedback cycles, continuous improvement, and visibility of work, all components of DevOps best prac - tices. For example, our fictional company “Acme Co” uses Playbooks for incident response . Possibly the most important feature of a good checklist is that it enables and supports any team member using it. Imagine your on-call engineer receiving a page at 3am local time and needing to perform all the necessary steps to head off an outage, alert others, start trouble - shooting, and make sure everything they do is tracked. That’s a lot to ask of someone who was asleep five minutes ago. A Playbook is there to enable that engineer for success, as well as providing a clear timeline and picture of what happened so far when the next member of the response team joins. In summary, Playbooks make life easier for everyone from release managers to on-call SREs by documenting and enforcing the use of an agreed-on process: 1. Use it for incident response 2. Use it for software releases 3. Use it for testing and QA procedures 4. Finally, use it to inform retrospectives and postmortems, which are important be - cause that’s where teammates can feel safe in sharing their opinions and experiences. Everyone is invited to contribute in an open format that encourages honest feedback and constructive suggestions for improvement. Those suggestions can then be worked back into the playbook to continuously improve the process and the team. Kaizen!