Resilience Engineering for the world of software systems
With all the talk of AI agents lately, including at conferences like SRECon ( whose videos are now available ), I thought it would be a good idea to revisit Ten Challenges for Making Automation a Team Player in Joint Human-Agent Activity by Gary Klein, David Woods, Jeffrey Bradshaw, and Paul
Last week I wrote about when to intervene , specifically when overseeing a process. Today we'll address the question when it comes to being on-call specifically. Usually, when I get this question, it's because either A) the asker is new to incident response and wants to
Here we're looking at an article by Sidney Dekker and David Woods. They looked at what happens when humans move into more a supervisory role for a process, one in which they're primarily intended to handle unexpected cases. As you might expect, things don't
Thanks to early reader Swizec and Harley Lohs for early reading and editing! I've been reading this book, Accelerated Expertise by By Robert R. Hoffman, Paul Ward, Paul J. Feltovich, Lia DiBello, Stephen M. Fiore, and Dee H. Andrews [1] that tries to explain what the current state-
Thanks to Kurt Andersen for bringing this one to my attention. Harvard Business Review recently published an article about how much time and energy it takes to get something done because of how many different applications are involved lately. If you've been a reader for a while, you&
Last we talked about the Gimli Glider , we looked at what happened in the air and ultimately how disaster was averted when the 767 ran out of fuel midflight. Let's take a look at what happened to the plane before Captain Pearson encounters it in Montreal. This
This story shows how complex and intertwined notions of failure and success are. Success and failures during incidents (and operations in general) are more nuanced and complex than a simple binary. If we're too quick to label something a failure, we risk overlooking all the different changing goals
By now, you’ve likely heard about the outage of the Notice to Air Missions (NOTAM) system that is used to deliver messages to pilots and the US-wide ground stop. If you’ve been following along you have read a few different accounts and “explanations”
It was great seeing some of you folks attend the chat I had with Matt Davis around on-call programs and incident response! If you missed it you can check it out here The Messy Details: Insights From the Study of Technical Work in Healthcare Why study technical work at
Measuring system resilience with the Resilience Analysis Grid “What metrics do I use to show or assess resilience?” That’s almost always the first question the I get when I talk to folks who are new to resilience engineering or are introducing it their organization. Unfortunately, its
As you may have already heard, Dr Richard Cook passed away on August 31, 2022. I was fortunate to be able to get to know him and consider him both a mentor and a friend. It is in large part due to his advice and encouragement that Resilience Roundup exists
Beyond Simon’s Slice: Five Fundamental Trade-Offs that Bound the Performance of Macrocognitive Work Systems This is a paper by David Woods and Robert Hoffman. They go over the different rules, bounds, and cognitive laws that govern cognitive systems. The title of the paper of comes from the
Continuing the experiment bringing you papers and analysis that are harder to find, so you may not have access to this paper. If you need help getting access to the original, let me know. Drowning ‘Truths’: Contrasting experiential-experts’ perceptions with official-experts drowning reports on Australia&
This is a special issue, while I’ve included a link here, it unfortunately does not provide the full text. This is part on an experiment to bring you analysis of things you may not have otherwise seen, especially when the subject matter is so important and applicable. The
Grounding in Communication If you’ve ever done almost any sort of incident response at all, you know that coordination and communication are important. But did you ever wonder or stop to think about how it works? That’s exactly what I’m going to be talking