Building Safer Technology: A Field Guide to Failing Well

2 Applied Examples

Before we jump into the details of the methodology, it’s useful to look at some concrete examples. These have the advantage of letting you see how the process looks end-to-end, so that later on, when we go into details, there won’t be any steps with a mysterious purpose. They also speak to how this methodology was built in the first place—by dealing with a lot of real-world systems.

These examples, as well as the ones that appear later in the book, are chosen for their differences. We begin with a “clean” hypothetical that makes the bones of the process clear before proceeding to several real-world systems and their messy real-world effects. In none of these cases, even the real-world ones, are we attempting to assign blame. ...