Talk:Defensive design

Made up term?
Did someone invent this term to hawk some books?

This entire article should be ignored or better yet deleted since all of the supposed aspects (and more) are appropriately covered in various DFx articles. "Defensive Design" is apparently someone's clever way of saying "Design for 'x'" where x = Reliability, Safety, Assembly, Manufacturing, Environment, Testing, etc, etc, etc.

Even Poka-yoke makes more sense in terms of "error-proofing".

In almost 30 years of applied DFx work I have never heard anyone refer to "defensive design".

Ken (talk) 16:10, 12 December 2007 (UTC)

What does Defensive Design have to do with "Defective by Design"? I think this "See also" entry should be removed. --Lukas —Preceding unsigned comment added by 217.238.85.243 (talk) 21:52, 4 January 2010 (UTC)

This article does deserve to survive, it has a rather specific and unique meaning different from "Design for reliability" or "Error-proofing". It comes up a lot more often in programming (which is, admittedly, covered under Defensive Programming...perhaps the articles could be merged, since they cover the same principle). The rather specific idea it connotes is to design an item a handling for every possible situation it could possibly be in. For example, defensive designing of a firearm would involve considering what the design does or should do if the firearm is held upside down, as a starting point. It actually reminds me somewhat of cryptography, in which creating a new cryptographic solution requires considering all possible attacks, from all possible sources, e.g., someone tapping the phone line, someone pretending to be the other party, someone having access to one's computer, someone who is a spy in the key-issuing authority, etc. 99.172.41.123 (talk) 03:58, 23 March 2010 (UTC)


 * In my opinion the answer to the question of deleting this article is truly open. Ken, is there a more commonly-accepted term for the design philosophy hereby referred to as defensive design? Poka-yoke does not seem to refer to a design philosophy, or at least this isn't reflected in its article.


 * The article in its present form does not cite any source. Looking closer through other articles and their talk pages suggests (yes I am speculating) that the term comes from: either the Murphy community claiming credit for the wide-spread engineering interpretation of Murphy's law; or the defensive programming community promoting a generalisation of their programming philosophy. Either way or any other way is fine as long as a valid source can be produced. As it stands now defensive design was removed from the Murphy's law article, and the defensive programming and defensive design articles refer to each other circularly.


 * A term for the design philosophy hereby referred to as defensive design is welcome. If defensive design is lacking taste, I suggest a more telling term such as intelligent design.


 * Nrlsouza (talk) 09:38, 3 January 2011 (UTC)


 * anonymous (talk) 09:03, 3 June 2019 (UTC)

Electrical power sockets are asymmetric in specific countries only. Various electric input/output connectors in general are regularly asymmetric. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 91.155.216.147 (talk) 09:04, 2 June 2019 (UTC)

Scope/Reference?
Does it only apply to end-users? What about environmental conditions? Doesn't it seem to be a newly born term(No references yet)? It separated the "software engineering" field, so what is it by default? "Hardware Engineering"? Alifakoor (talk) 08:18, 28 August 2010 (UTC)

Bug in example
Well, there's a flaw in the example about working hours.

"for number of hours worked in one week the amount for any specified employee can be 0, can be fractional, but can't be negative and can't be greater than 168, nor more than 24 times the number of days they were in attendance". The number of hours in a week can be greater than 168 if the user observes Daylight Saving Time. Likewise, the number of hours in a day could be more than 24. MCEmperor (talk) 10:17, 6 September 2021 (UTC)