Open Source Summit + ELC Europe 2019

Have you ever worked on a system where, if it fails, people may wind up dead?

How do you deal with risk, and with inevitable screw-ups? And
what can you learn from high-risk engineering, even if failure of your products
is only met with annoyed eye-rolls, not blood-curdling screams?

How do pilots deal with big or small failures? How do doctors? How do engineers
who build safety-critical systems?

There are tools to deal with this: technical, or process-related, but most crucially cultural: how to make it safe for your colleagues to mess up?

Safe technically, but moreso emotionally.

Because if you make it emotionally safe to fail, you enable discussions about ways the system might fail -- will fail, given enough time -- and what to do about them.

And it will give you a shot at reacting quickly, gracefully, correctly once you inevitably encounter failure.

Inviting your engineers to fail might be the most safety-conscious thing you
will ever do.