Building Safer Technology: A Field Guide to Failing Well

3 Understanding Failure Modes

Thus far, we have talked about how safety engineering centers on planning for when something goes wrong—also known as failure modes—and you have seen the Safety Engineering Methodology applied to several examples. This chapter takes a more nuanced look at the process of building understanding, along with the techniques for effectively identifying and prioritizing potential failure modes for the things you are planning to build.

Let’s start by defining failure modes in more depth. Fundamentally, when we talk about failure modes within the context of this book, we mean any scenario where a system fails to operate appropriately and effectively within the context in which it operates. Failure modes can come from ...