Manufacturing companies pay attention to workplace safety. Products are recalled if they can potentially injure a consumer. These aren’t new trends. Joshua Kerievsky, CEO of Industrial Logic, has taken those do-no-harm concepts and applied them to an industry that typically doesn’t have to deal with physical danger – software development.
In a recent blog post, Joshua equates normal software issues to injuries. As he explains, things like bugs, crashes and frustration also cause harm (albeit a different kind). From Industrial Logic:
Injuries impede our ability to excel.
Consider these all-too-common injuries to software users:
- Bug Bruise: pain caused by the impact of a software defect
- Data Debacle Distress: despair or disgust from lost, corrupt or stolen data
- Error Embarrassment: self-consciousness or shame caused by making an error
- Functionality Frustration: dissatisfaction with awkward or nonsensical functionality
- Interface Irritation: anger or impatience caused by a bad user interface
- Manual Work Misery: loathing arising from manual, repetitive labor
- Setup Suffering: the pain of an unpleasant product setup experience
- Upgrade Unhappiness: frustration and difficulties caused by an upgrade
- Waiting Woes: grief from waiting
Now consider these common injuries to software makers:
- Alteration Anxiety: apprehensive uneasiness associated with making changes
- Antique Agony: mental anguish from working with old technology
- Brain Hernia: straining your brain to understand code with high conceptual weight
- Browser Bruise: pain caused by the blow of a browser bug
- Bug Burn: feeling burned by a defect, particularly one that injured users
- Fractured Flow: feeling interrupted causing an inability to focus
- Fragility Frustration: dissatisfaction with that which is easily and perpetually broken
- Merge Misery: suffering caused by difficult merges of code
- Outage Ordeal: severe stress caused by a major failure or interruption
- Release Rage: exhausting, manual release to production that robs one of family time, sleep, joy
- Schedule Stress: tension associated with a deadline
Joshua makes the case – using examples from factories – that improving safety can have wide reaching and lucrative results. Thinking of the issues listed above in terms of real harm will help companies address problems that have been ignored for too long. In turn, this will help companies produce better software and create happier customers.
Valuing tech safety means continuously improving the safety of processes, codebases, workplaces, relationships, products and services. …
Tech safety leads us to
- learn how things actually work
- discover safer ways to work
- reduce or remove complexity
- visualize and remove hazards
- establish standards
- experiment and innovate
Read more about the concept of “tech safety” at Industrial Logic >>>