We audited our own automations with the 10-minute review - what it caught

Description and use

Small teams often suffer silent automation failures. A monthly 10‑minute review uncovered four issues in four jobs, improving reliability.

Problem

Small-team automations often fail silently, producing wrong output without notice for weeks.

Outcome

Four jobs, four findings, twelve minutes. The review uncovered a zombie job, unread logs, missing kill switch, and an unnecessary automated task, leading to more robust automation.

Workflow

• Schedule a monthly 10‑minute review before deployment
• List every automation job
• For each job answer: last run, last human review, silent stop impact
• If any issue found, kill or fix the job
• Document run logs, kill switches, and review sheet

Evidence

The review step — the thing that reads the ledger — had no owner and no calendar slot.

A deploy‑triggered ping that pointed at a URL we changed two months ago. It "ran" daily and delivered nothing to nobody.

If it misfired, it would restart the same broken thing forever, confidently.