September 2025
Intermediate to advanced
200 pages
5h 47m
English
Content preview from Responsible Software Engineering
Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
Chapter 4. Anticipating and Planning for Downstream Consequences
If you spend time in a hospital or other health care facility, you will probably encounter a crash cart—a mobile cart that holds critical medications and supplies for emergencies. Crash carts are designed for convenience and speed. In an emergency, a nurse or another medical professional can quickly grab whatever they need from a crash cart to help patients.
One manufacturer of crash carts, who shall remain nameless, realized that its products needed some sort of security so passersby couldn’t just walk off with drugs or other medical supplies. So, it designed a locking mechanism that required users to authenticate before they could access the contents. Also, someone at the company decided that the best way to authenticate was by thumbprint so doctors and nurses wouldn’t have to remember passwords or PINs. The manufacturer therefore added a thumbprint reader to the cart design.
Now, imagine that you are a nurse frantically tending to an emergency patient with a gunshot wound to the chest. Every second counts as you rush to save their life. The patient needs an injection of epinephrine immediately from the crash cart, so you place your thumb on the reader, and…nothing happens. Because you are wearing medical gloves. Which are covered in blood. Thumbprint readers can be great for security, but in this case, their inclusion caused downstream consequences that weren’t anticipated by the designer.
In recent years, you’ve ...
Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.
Read now
Unlock full access
More than 5,000 organizations count on O’Reilly
O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.