Building Safety Into Our Work

[Jordan Mantha]

On Fri, May 20, 2011 at 10:29 PM, Robert Potter <rpotter at zoncko.com> wrote:
>
>
> On Fri, May 20, 2011 at 2:58 PM, Jono Bacon <jono at ubuntu.com> wrote:
>>
>> On Fri, 2011-05-20 at 14:55 -0600, Mike Basinger wrote:
>> ....It seems one simple approach is just throwing warning notices
>> everywhere
>> before someone pulls the trigger, but I also wonder if there a better
>> way of categorizing different options into different levels of risk.
>>
>>
> although you are right, we could plaster warning sings all over the place, I
> don't think it is as beneficial as some sort of roll back method.  If I want
> to install or make a change and I get a warning, I only have two options -
> don't do it out of fear, or try it in hopes of achieving what it supposedly
> will achieve.  As a result, I think most people will simply assume the
> warning is just a precaution with no real chance of happening.
> For that reason I am hopeful some sort of roll back / system repair option
> could be found.  I think "a" warning message is still good though.

To my mind, an even better solution in most cases is to just not do
things that are likely to cause problems. For me the idea of a "undo"
or rollback is to make it easy to understand what configuration
settings do. Part of the benefit of a  Kitchen Sink sort of tool is
that it shouldn't let users shoot themselves in the foot where
possible.

Warning messages are good, undo/redo are good, rollback would be nice,
but I think the safest thing is to not get users into those positions
in the first place.

-Jordan