In the O’Reilly book Seeking SRE our colleague Richard Cook and I wrote a chapter entitled “SRE Cognitive Work”. You might notice on this blog (as well as Lorin Hochstein’s, Thai Woods’, and Resilience in Software Foundation (RISF) community posts, and many others) we often reference the term cognitive work when talking about the challenges […]
Cognitive work in software engineering Read More »
The abstract for article “The End of Code Review: Coding Agents Supersede Human Inspection” paints this picture for the reader… Abstract – Code review has been the primary quality gate in software development since Fagan formalised code inspection in 1976. For five decades, having a human examine and comment on a colleague’s changes before merge
There is more to code review than (automatable) detection Read More »
Cognitive Systems Engineering is a multidisciplinary field which focuses on designing complex, safety-critical human-machine systems by analyzing cognitive work (e.g., decision-making, planning) and constraints (e.g., memory, time pressure) to enhance human performance. CSE can sometimes get conflated with traditional UX/UI, because both care about “humans and interfaces,” but they operate at very different levels of
How is a Cognitive Systems Engineering perspective different from traditional UX/UI? Read More »
The Criticality of Sustaining the Deployment Pipeline During COVID-19 Much thanks to the members of the Learning From Incidents community who helped review and contribute to drafts of this post! The world is in crisis but I feel like the approach that tech companies around the world are taking to immediately add significant bureaucracy to
Troubled Times, Episode 1 Read More »
I had to take up the challenge of speaking about Resilience Engineering at an Ignite talk that I gave at the always excellent NYC DevOpsDays. Here’s the abstract for this 5 minute talk: Of course the answer to the question in the title is “no” because this twenty-year old multidisciplinary field is as broad and
Can Resilience Engineering be sufficiently described in 5 minutes? Read More »
During the early weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic, Dr. David Woods wrote diary entries about his observations as the pandemic unfolded.
A Resilience Engineer’s Diary on COVID-19 Read More »
At the Re-Deploy conference in 2019, our colleague Dr. Richard Cook gave one of the most cogent and clear talks on descriptions of resilience and resilience engineering that I’ve yet to come across. This work is only represented in this conference talk form — Richard did not capture this exceptional description in an article or
The Resilience of Bone and Resilience Engineering Read More »
A question today on Twitter regarding the distinction between “how” questions and “why?” questions reminded me of another reflection on this topic, in Tricks of the Trade: How to Think About Your Research While You’re Doing It. Howard Becker (University of Chicago) in 1998 wrote on page 58: Ask “How?” Not “Why?” Everyone knows this
“Tricks of the Trade” on ‘how?’ versus ‘why?’ Read More »
1) Incident reviews serve multiple purposes. Some of these purposes are overt and explicit but many are not. Some of these purposes cut across others in unproductive ways. Competing agendas reveal the power dynamics present in the organization. A manager who complains that too few action items were produced has revealed his/her real interest: the
Some Observations On the Messy Realities of Incident Reviews Read More »
A few weeks ago I tweeted this thread which references sacrifice decisions and contrasts some facets of the Knight Capital (2012) case and the NYSE trading halt (2015) case: On Aug 1, 2012, a company named Knight Capital experienced a business-destroying incident. Much has been written about it, but that’s not the topic of this thread.
Hindsight and Sacrifice Decisions Read More »
Dr. Richard Cook and I were honored to contribute to a chapter in the new book Seeking SRE edited by the lovely David Blank-Edelman. Consider it a signpost along the way as we learn more about how engineers actually do their work in real-world scenarios (rather than abstract or generalized descriptions of how we like to
Chapter in “Seeking SRE”: SRE Cognitive Work Read More »
