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How would a UI change have made the outcome different if the employee actually wanted to send a real alert?
by lsaferite 9y ago
How would a UI change have made the outcome different if the employee actually wanted to send a real alert?
- hinkley 9y agoWhen you're doing a post-mortem you're supposed to think about how to prevent the next one, not how to prevent the one that already happened (someone needs to tell the State Dept this). So you look at all of the contributing factors and you come up with a plan for all the ones you can reasonably address. It's been identified that a reasonable person could accidentally send a real alert even when they intended to send a fake one. So you fix that too because why the hell would you leave it once you've found it? Or to put it another way, they're already in the middle of a PR disaster. You get a second one if the press gets wind of the idea that you're cutting stupid simple corners on the remediation. And make no mistake: Fixing a UI issue with the benefit of hindsight is a stupid simple fix (avoiding it to begin with is much harder).
- Johnny555 9y agoThis is a solved problem -- the UI could require confirmation from a second employee.
- askvictor 9y agoYou have minutes before the missiles hit. Waiting around for Steve to get back from the toilet could cost a lot of lives.
- Johnny555 9y agoLike I said, the 2-man rule is a solved problem. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-man_rule https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-man_rule What does Bob do when he goes to the toilet? He asks Steve to cover him. So if you need 2 people to send an alert, when Bob is at the console, and Steve is secondary, when Steve has to go to the toilet, he asks Jill to cover him. Alternatively a backup authorization method could be used. It does mean having 3 people available at all times, but since there are life-safety implications of real alerts as well as false alerts, it seems like a reasonable safeguard to have.