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The Hierarchy of Hazard Controls
The other day a mechanical engineer introduced me to the Hierarchy of Controls (HoC), an important concept in workplace safety. 1 (source) To protect people from hazards, system designers should seek to use the most effective controls available. This means elimination over substitution, substitution over engineering controls, etc. Can we use the Hierarchy of Controls in software engineering? Software environments are different than physical environments, but maybe there are some ideas worth extracting.
The problem with this is that if I run this a lot in my local environment, I’ll build up the muscle memory to press y, which will ruin my day when I do the same thing in prod. PPE can reduce the risk of injury (I am less likely to be run over by a forklift if I am wearing a reflective vest) or the severity (a hard hat doesn’t prevent objects from falling on me, but it cushions the impact). I’m still working out exactly what this thought is, but: in the real world, people interact with hazards through “natural interfaces”, basically as an object situated in space.
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