Archive for December, 2007

Fault Trees vs Failure Modes Analysis

FMA, or FMEA (Failure modes and effects analysis) is the old-fashioned way of hunting down all the ways in which things can go pear-shaped, in the hopes that such events could be avoided. I was reminded of it when I came across a random article using fault trees to illustrate ways in which modern disk [...]

Servants of the software realm

[updated 2009-10-27]
In my next piece about roles in the software realm, I tackle the people who actually build software applications…

System stability and implications

It’s easy to categorise a system’s stability based on how it behaves whenever you try to change it. But have you ever wondered if stability correlates with anything else in your organisation? Read on to find out…

Guardians of the software realm

I thought it would be handy to have a roundup of all the players involved in software projects, and how they are related. In this post, I will start with the ‘guardians’, the people who are responsible for the software produced and who shepherd it from one environment to the other.

methodology shmethodology

Building and managing systems in a tried-but-not-necessarily-tested way must be a very useful thing to be able to do. Why else would there be so many instances of this practice? Throw in a prevailing belief that there isn’t time or money to allow for ‘best practices’, and you’re practially building something almost entirely for the [...]

The SDLC : a forgotten animal

Years back, sitting in computer science classes, we heard about the software methodologies of the day. We also wanted to claw our eyes out with sheer boredom. Even in the halls of academia, where all that is theoretical and impractical can find many happy adherents; even there, the usefulness of the SDLC was [...]

Up and running!

Wow… I  am finally about to take the leap into the wonderful world of systems theory – something I’ve been planning for a long while now…  I’ve been jotting stuff down in my notebooks and sketchbooks for ages about how I would launch this new portal.
I never really had time to get the ball rolling [...]