Reliability On The Move

This book represents the porceedings of the 1989 Safety and Reliability Society Symposium held in Bath on the 11th and 12th of October on that topic.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A “wonderful memoir” (Los Angeles Times) about a brilliantly unconventional physician and writer, a man who has illuminated the many ways that the brain makes us human. • “Intimate.... Brim[s] with life and affection.” —The New York Times When Oliver Sacks was twelve years old, a perceptive schoolmaster wrote: “Sacks will go far, if he does not go too far.” It is now abundantly clear that Sacks has never stopped going. With unbridled honesty and humor, Sacks writes about the passions that have driven his life—from motorcycles and weight lifting to neurology and poetry. He writes about his love affairs, both romantic and intellectual; his guilt over leaving his family to come to America; his bond with his schizophrenic brother; and the writers and scientists—W. H. Auden, Gerald M. Edelman, Francis Crick—who have influenced his work.

The overwhelming majority of a software system’s lifespan is spent in use, not in design or implementation. So, why does conventional wisdom insist that software engineers focus primarily on the design and development of large-scale computing systems? In this collection of essays and articles, key members of Google’s Site Reliability Team explain how and why their commitment to the entire lifecycle has enabled the company to successfully build, deploy, monitor, and maintain some of the largest software systems in the world. You’ll learn the principles and practices that enable Google engineers to make systems more scalable, reliable, and efficient—lessons directly applicable to your organization. This book is divided into four sections: Introduction—Learn what site reliability engineering is and why it differs from conventional IT industry practices Principles—Examine the patterns, behaviors, and areas of concern that influence the work of a site reliability engineer (SRE) Practices—Understand the theory and practice of an SRE’s day-to-day work: building and operating large distributed computing systems Management—Explore Google's best practices for training, communication, and meetings that your organization can use

A human-centric guide to solving complex problems in engineering management, from sizing teams to handling technical debt. There’s a saying that people don’t leave companies, they leave managers. Management is a key part of any organization, yet the discipline is often self-taught and unstructured. Getting to the good solutions for complex management challenges can make the difference between fulfillment and frustration for teams—and, ultimately, between the success and failure of companies. Will Larson’s An Elegant Puzzle focuses on the particular challenges of engineering management—from sizing teams to handling technical debt to performing succession planning—and provides a path to the good solutions. Drawing from his experience at Digg, Uber, and Stripe, Larson has developed a thoughtful approach to engineering management for leaders of all levels at companies of all sizes. An Elegant Puzzle balances structured principles and human-centric thinking to help any leader create more effective and rewarding organizations for engineers to thrive in.

The Sage Handbook of Research on Classroom Assessment provides scholars, professors, graduate students, and other researchers and policy makers in the organizations, agencies, testing companies, and school districts with a comprehensive source of research on all aspects of K-12 classroom assessment. The handbook emphasizes theory, conceptual frameworks, and all varieties of research (quantitative, qualitative, mixed methods) to provide an in-depth understanding of the knowledge base in each area of classroom assessment and how to conduct inquiry in the area. It presents classroom assessment research to convey, in depth, the state of knowledge and understanding that is represented by the research, with particular emphasis on how classroom assessment practices affect student achieventment and teacher behavior. Editor James H. McMillan and five Associate Editors bring the best thinking and analysis from leading classroom assessment researchers on the nature of the research, making significant contributions to this prominent and hotly debated topic in education.

Today's marketplace demands product reliability. At the same time, it places ever-increasing demands on products that push the limits of their performance and their functional life, and it does so with the expectation of lower per-unit product costs. To meet these demands, product design now requires a focused, streamlined, concurrent engineering process that will produce a product at the lowest possible cost in the least amount of time. Design for Reliability provides a systematic approach to the design process that is sharply focused on reliability and firmly based on the physics of failure. It imparts an understanding of how, why, and when to use the wide variety of reliability engineering tools available and offers fundamental insight into the total design cycle. Applicable from the idea phase of the product development cycle through product obsolescence, Design for Reliability (DfR) concepts integrated with reliability verification and analytical physics form a coherent stage gate/phase design process that helps ensure that a product will meet customers' reliability objectives. Whether you are a high-volume manufacturer of consumer items or a low volume producer of military commodities, your goal is the same: to bring a product to market using a process focused on designing out or mitigating potential failure modes prior to production release. Readers of Design for Reliability will learn to meet that goal and move beyond solidifying a basic offering to the marketplace to creating a true competitive advantage.

Although service-level objectives (SLOs) continue to grow in importance, there’s a distinct lack of information about how to implement them. Practical advice that does exist usually assumes that your team already has the infrastructure, tooling, and culture in place. In this book, recognized SLO expert Alex Hidalgo explains how to build an SLO culture from the ground up. Ideal as a primer and daily reference for anyone creating both the culture and tooling necessary for SLO-based approaches to reliability, this guide provides detailed analysis of advanced SLO and service-level indicator (SLI) techniques. Armed with mathematical models and statistical knowledge to help you get the most out of an SLO-based approach, you’ll learn how to build systems capable of measuring meaningful SLIs with buy-in across all departments of your organization. Define SLIs that meaningfully measure the reliability of a service from a user’s perspective Choose appropriate SLO targets, including how to perform statistical and probabilistic analysis Use error budgets to help your team have better discussions and make better data-driven decisions Build supportive tooling and resources required for an SLO-based approach Use SLO data to present meaningful reports to leadership and your users