Learning from the Mistakes of Others

Learning from your mistakes is good. Learning from the mistakes of others is better. One mistake that often occurs in projects that include any kind of software is the lack of sanity checks.

For example, hackers broke into Yandex Taxi yesterday. They ordered every available car in all of Moscow to the same address. The result was a humongous traffic jam on Kutuzovsky Prospekt that took more than two hours to resolve. A sanity check would limit the number of cars that could be sent to the same address. Many of the recent failures of self-driving cars and trucks would not have happened if the software had sanity checks.

Do you have a process for sharing stories of things that went wrong? Whenever you have a meeting, have someone tell a story about something that went wrong and discuss what you can learn from that in your organization.

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