> Negative engineering is the time-consuming and sometimes frustrating work that engineers undertake to ensure the success of their primary objectives. If posit

> Negative engineering is the time-consuming and sometimes frustrating work that engineers undertake to ensure the success of their primary objectives. If positive engineering is taken to mean the day-to-day work that engineers do to deliver productive, expected outcomes, then negative engineering is the insurance that protects those outcomes by defending them from an infinity of possible failures. Interesting creation of an "improper noun" (to borrow a phrase from a HN post from a couple days ago).