Tradeoff Decisions In System Design

This textbook is about three key aspects of system design: decision making under uncertainty, trade-off studies and formal risk analyses. Recognizing that the mathematical treatment of these topics is similar, the authors generalize existing mathematical techniques to cover all three areas. Common to these topics are importance weights, combining functions, scoring functions, quantitative metrics, prioritization and sensitivity analyses. Furthermore, human decision-making activities and problems use these same tools. Therefore, these problems are also treated uniformly and modeled using prospect theory. Aimed at both engineering and business practitioners and students interested in systems engineering, risk analysis, operational management, and business process modeling, Tradeoff Decisions in System Design explains how humans can overcome cognitive biases and avoid mental errors when conducting trade-off studies and risk analyses in a wide range of domains. With generous use of examples as a common thread across chapters this book. “This book provides an excellent road map for designing and producing competitive products.”

This book provides an excellent road map for designing and producing competitive products. Aimed at both engineering and business practitioners and students interested in systems engineering, risk analysis, operational management, and business process modeling, Tradeoff Decisions in System Design explains how humans can overcome cognitive biases and avoid mental errors when conducting trade-off studies and risk analyses in a wide range of domains. With generous use of examples as a common thread across chapters this book.

Optimize the decisions that define your code by exploring the common mistakes and intentional tradeoffs made by expert developers. In Software Mistakes and Tradeoffs you will learn how to: Reason about your systems to make intuitive and better design decisions Understand consequences and how to balance tradeoffs Pick the right library for your problem Thoroughly analyze all of your service’s dependencies Understand delivery semantics and how they influence distributed architecture Design and execute performance tests to detect code hot paths and validate a system’s SLA Detect and optimize hot paths in your code to focus optimization efforts on root causes Decide on a suitable data model for date/time handling to avoid common (but subtle) mistakes Reason about compatibility and versioning to prevent unexpected problems for API clients Understand tight/loose coupling and how it influences coordination of work between teams Clarify requirements until they are precise, easily implemented, and easily tested Optimize your APIs for friendly user experience Code performance versus simplicity. Delivery speed versus duplication. Flexibility versus maintainability—every decision you make in software engineering involves balancing tradeoffs. In Software Mistakes and Tradeoffs you’ll learn from costly mistakes that Tomasz Lelek and Jon Skeet have encountered over their impressive careers. You’ll explore real-world scenarios where poor understanding of tradeoffs lead to major problems down the road, so you can pre-empt your own mistakes with a more thoughtful approach to decision making. Learn how code duplication impacts the coupling and evolution speed of your systems, and how simple-sounding requirements can have hidden nuances with respect to date and time information. Discover how to efficiently narrow your optimization scope according to 80/20 Pareto principles, and ensure consistency in your distributed systems. You’ll soon have built up the kind of knowledge base that only comes from years of experience. About the technology Every step in a software project involves making tradeoffs. When you’re balancing speed, security, cost, delivery time, features, and more, reasonable design choices may prove problematic in production. The expert insights and relatable war stories in this book will help you make good choices as you design and build applications. About the book Software Mistakes and Tradeoffs explores real-world scenarios where the wrong tradeoff decisions were made and illuminates what could have been done differently. In it, authors Tomasz Lelek and Jon Skeet share wisdom based on decades of software engineering experience, including some delightfully instructive mistakes. You’ll appreciate the specific tips and practical techniques that accompany each example, along with evergreen patterns that will change the way you approach your next projects. What's inside How to reason about your software systematically How to pick tools, libraries, and frameworks How tight and loose coupling affect team coordination Requirements that are precise, easy to implement, and easy to test About the reader For mid- and senior-level developers and architects who make decisions about software design and implementation. About the author Tomasz Lelek works daily with a wide range of production services, architectures, and JVM languages. A Google engineer and author of C# in Depth, Jon Skeet is famous for his many practical contributions to Stack Overflow.

Can a system be considered truly reliable if it isn't fundamentally secure? Or can it be considered secure if it's unreliable? Security is crucial to the design and operation of scalable systems in production, as it plays an important part in product quality, performance, and availability. In this book, experts from Google share best practices to help your organization design scalable and reliable systems that are fundamentally secure. Two previous O’Reilly books from Google—Site Reliability Engineering and The Site Reliability Workbook—demonstrated how and why a commitment to the entire service lifecycle enables organizations to successfully build, deploy, monitor, and maintain software systems. In this latest guide, the authors offer insights into system design, implementation, and maintenance from practitioners who specialize in security and reliability. They also discuss how building and adopting their recommended best practices requires a culture that’s supportive of such change. You’ll learn about secure and reliable systems through: Design strategies Recommendations for coding, testing, and debugging practices Strategies to prepare for, respond to, and recover from incidents Cultural best practices that help teams across your organization collaborate effectively

The 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens in southwest Washington State radically changed the physical and socio-economic landscapes of the region. The eruption destroyed the summit of the volcano, sending large amounts of debris into the North Fork Toutle River, and blocking the sole means of drainage from Spirit Lake 4 miles north of Mount St. Helens. As a result of the blockage, rising lake levels could cause failure of the debris blockage, putting the downstream population of approximately 50,000 at risk of catastrophic flooding and mud flows. Further, continued transport of sediment to the river from volcanic debris deposits surrounding the mountain reduces the flood carrying capacity of downstream river channels and leaves the population vulnerable to chronic flooding. The legacy of the 1980 eruption and the prospect of future volcanic, seismic, and flood events mean that risk management in the Spirit Lake Toutle River system will be challenging for decades to come. This report offers a decision framework to support the long-term management of risks related to the Spirit Lake and Toutle River system in light of the different regional economic, cultural, and social priorities, and the respective roles of federal, tribal, state, and local authorities, as well as other entities and groups in the region. It also considers the history and adequacy of characterization, monitoring, and management associated with the Spirit Lake debris blockage and outflow tunnel, other efforts to control transport of water and sediment from the 1980 and later eruptions, and suggests additional information needed to support implementation of the recommended decision framework.

Presents information to create a trade-off analysis framework for use in government and commercial acquisition environments This book presents a decision management process based on decision theory and cost analysis best practices aligned with the ISO/IEC 15288, the Systems Engineering Handbook, and the Systems Engineering Body of Knowledge. It provides a sound trade-off analysis framework to generate the tradespace and evaluate value and risk to support system decision-making throughout the life cycle. Trade-off analysis and risk analysis techniques are examined. The authors present an integrated value trade-off and risk analysis framework based on decision theory. These trade-off analysis concepts are illustrated in the different life cycle stages using multiple examples from defense and commercial domains. Provides techniques to identify and structure stakeholder objectives and creative, doable alternatives Presents the advantages and disadvantages of tradespace creation and exploration techniques for trade-off analysis of concepts, architectures, design, operations, and retirement Covers the sources of uncertainty in the system life cycle and examines how to identify, assess, and model uncertainty using probability Illustrates how to perform a trade-off analysis using the INCOSE Decision Management Process using both deterministic and probabilistic techniques Trade-off Analytics: Creating and Exploring the System Tradespace is written for upper undergraduate students and graduate students studying systems design, systems engineering, industrial engineering and engineering management. This book also serves as a resource for practicing systems designers, systems engineers, project managers, and engineering managers. Gregory S. Parnell, PhD, is a Research Professor in the Department of Industrial Engineering at the University of Arkansas. He is also a senior principal with Innovative Decisions, Inc., a decision and risk analysis firm and has served as Chairman of the Board. Dr. Parnell has published more than 100 papers and book chapters and was lead editor of Decision Making for Systems Engineering and Management, Wiley Series in Systems Engineering (2nd Ed, Wiley 2011) and lead author of the Handbook of Decision Analysis (Wiley 2013). He is a fellow of INFORMS, the INCOSE, MORS, and the Society for Decision Professionals.

This volume constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Foundations of Augmented Cognition, AC 2016, held as part of the 18th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction, HCII 2016, which took place in Toronto, Canada, in July 2016. HCII 2016 received a total of 4354 submissions, of which 1287 papers were accepted for publication after a careful reviewing process. The 41 papers presented in this volume were organized in topical sections named: augmented cognition in training and education; human cognition and behavior in complex tasks and environments; interaction in augmented cognition; and social cognition.