Run a full incident from report to handover, and write what you would tell the user

capstone · 90 min · Objective 3.3

Task

Take a written scenario from first report through machine, account and communication, producing a contemporaneous log, a decision, a recovery record and the actual words you would say. This is the domain's capstone because the conversation is as examinable as the technical work and is the part most often done badly.

Steps

  1. Write lab/full/report.md as the user's first report in their own words, including at least one detail that turns out to matter and one that does not.
  2. Work the machine half and keep a contemporaneous log in lab/full/log.csv with header time,action,finding,evidence,decision_point.
  3. Work the account half and record it in lab/full/account.csv with header surface,found,action,order -- in the order you did them.
  4. Write lab/full/decision.md giving clean, rebuild or escalate, with the criteria, and stating explicitly what you could not establish.
  5. Write lab/full/toldthem.md as the exact words you would say to the user, and lab/full/escalation.md as what you would hand to whoever it goes to next -- observations and times, with belief marked as belief.

Verify

grep -Ec '^[-*#0-9A-Za-z]' lab/full/report.md
awk -F, 'NR>1 && NF>=5 {n++} END {print n" logged action(s)"}' lab/full/log.csv
awk -F, 'NR>1 && $4!="" {n++} END {print n" action(s) with evidence"}' lab/full/log.csv
awk -F, 'NR>1 && NF>=4 {n++} END {print n" account surface(s)"}' lab/full/account.csv
grep -Eic 'could not establish|unknown|not determined' lab/full/decision.md
grep -Eic 'thank' lab/full/toldthem.md
grep -Eic 'believe|belief|likely' lab/full/escalation.md

Eight logged actions with evidence, six account surfaces, a decision that names what could not be established, words to the user beginning with thanks, and an escalation that marks belief as belief. An escalation stating a theory as fact is how the next person's first hour is wasted.

Notes

The two documents at the end are the deliverables that distinguish this from a technical exercise. One is written for a worried person and one for a colleague, and they are not the same document.

This is an independent study companion for CompTIA A+ Core 2 220-1202 and is not produced by or endorsed by CompTIA.