The space between "this shouldn't be happening" and "here's exactly what's going wrong and the steps to fix it" is at least half of the intellectual content of

The space between "this shouldn't be happening" and "here's exactly what's going wrong and the steps to fix it" is at least half of the intellectual content of software engineering. If you really want to have comprehensive, actionable runbooks then you need to budget at least as long to develop those as you did to develop the software. I think it's actually pretty reasonable that this is usually computed "on demand" for the failures that actually happen. Unless you're doing the Space Shuttle or something.