Category: Cognitive Systems Engineering

Invited article in IEEE Software – Technical Debt: Challenges and Perspectives

September 26, 2017 by allspaw

Earlier this year, I was asked to contribute to an article in IEEE Software, entitled “Technical Debt: Challenges and Perspectives.” I can’t post the entire article here, but I can post the accepted text of my part of the article here. [well] Misusing the Metaphor John Allspaw All technical disciplines (not just software development) require […]

Reflections on the 6th Resilience Engineering Symposium

June 26, 2015 by allspaw

I just spent the last week in Lisbon, Portugal at the Resilience Engineering Symposium. Zoran Perkov and I were invited to speak on the topic of software operations and resilience in the financial trading and Internet services worlds, to an audience of practitioners and researchers from all around the globe, in a myriad of industries. […]

Some Principles of Human-Centered Computing

June 16, 2015 by allspaw

From Perspectives On Cognitive Task Analysis: Historical Origins and Modern Communities of Practice (emphasis mine) The Aretha Franklin Principle Do not devalue the human to justify the machine. Do not criticize the machine to rationalize the human. Advocate the human—machine system to amplify both. The Sacagawea Principle Human-centered computational tools need to support active organization of […]

An Open Letter To Monitoring/Metrics/Alerting Companies

May 1, 2015 by allspaw

I’d like to open up a dialogue with companies who are selling X-As-A-Service products that are focused on assisting operations and development teams in tracking the health and performance of their software systems. [well]Note: It’s likely my suggestions below are understood and embraced by many companies already. I know a number of them who are […]

The Infinite Hows (or, the Dangers Of The Five Whys)

November 14, 2014 by allspaw

(this is also posted on O’Reilly’s Radar blog. Much thanks to Daniel Schauenberg, Morgan Evans, and Steven Shorrock for feedback on this) Before I begin this post, let me say that this is intended to be a critique of the Five Whys method, not a criticism of the people who are in favor of using […]

Translations Between Domains: David Woods

August 30, 2014 by allspaw

One of the reasons I’ve continued to be more and more interested in Human Factors and Safety Science is that I found myself without many answers to the questions I have had in my career. Questions surrounding how organizations work, how people think and work with computers, how decisions get made under uncertainty, and how […]

Engineering’s Relationship To Science

May 5, 2014 by allspaw

One of the things that I hoped to get across in my post about perspectives on mature engineering was the subtle idea that engineering’s relationship to science is not straightforward. My first caveat is that I am not a language expert, but I do respect it as a potential deadly weapon. I do hope that […]

Learning from Failure at Etsy

September 30, 2013 by allspaw

(This was originally posted on Code As Craft, Etsy’s engineering blog. I’m re-posting it here because it still resonates strongly as I prepare to teach a ‘postmortem facilitator’s course internally at Etsy.) Last week, Owen Thomas wrote a flattering article over at Business Insider on how we handle errors and mistakes at Etsy. I thought […]

A Mature Role for Automation: Part II

August 20, 2013 by allspaw

(Courtney Nash’s excellent post on this topic inadvertently pushed me to finally finish this – give it a read) In the last post on this topic, I hoped to lay the foundation for what a mature role for automation might look like in web operations, and bring considerations to the decision-making process involved with considering […]

Owning Attention (Considerations for Alert Design)

July 22, 2013 by allspaw

In the past month or two, I’ve spoken on the topic of alert design. There’s a video of my giving the talk (at Monitorama, as well), but I thought I’d try to post on the topic and material as well. The topic of alerts and “alert design” as seen as a deliberate and purposeful thing […]