Kill It with Fire

Kill It with Fire

Manage Aging Computer Systems (and Future Proof Modern Ones)

Marianne Bellotti

automation is beneficial when it’s clear who is responsible for the automation working in the first place and when failure states give users enough information to understand how they should triage the issue. Automation that encourages people to forget about it creates responsibility gaps. Automation that fails either silently or with unclear error messages at best wastes a lot of valuable engineering time and at worst triggers unpredictable and dangerous side effects.
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