How a Reliability Engineering mindset helps us deliver better products
The need to develop and deliver high-quality products compels software development organizations to constantly seek new ways of improving the performance, reliability, security, and scalability of software products.
In addition to the use of DevOps practices, Agile methodologies, Scrum meetings and continuous testing to overcome the many challenges of delivering high-quality products, reliability engineering is increasingly being used to drive development efficiency. Reliability engineering allows development teams to evaluate the inherent reliability of a product or process and identify potential areas for improvement.
We, at AFour, have been assisting technology and product startup organizations build cutting-edge products for over a decade now. As the bar for software product development has been raised, we have had to up our game too. On that journey, we have a Reliability Engineering CoE that guides how we use reliability engineering for our projects. The discipline allows us to verify and confirm the dependability of our products under development while allowing us to improve our processes and drive better results.
What is reliability engineering
Given the need for software products to function as intended under stated conditions, reliability engineering checks if the product is dependable, reliable, and available as designed. By applying certain engineering principles and techniques throughout the lifecycle of a product, it estimates, prevents, and manages engineering uncertainty and risks of failure.
Of course, risks or failures cannot be completely eliminated. The goal of reliability engineering is to evaluate the inherent reliability of a product or process, identify likely failures earlier in the release cycles, and suggest appropriate actions to mitigate the impact of those failures. Depending on the product lifecycle phase, reliability engineering uses several analysis techniques, as appropriate, to identify possible problems and assist in analyzing corrections and improvements.
How we embrace it to deliver better products
Reliability engineering has become an integral part of our software development process. We undertake reliability engineering as an ongoing process from the beginning, often, at the concept phase of product design. This emphasis continues until the final product is developed and is ready to be shipped.
When we begin early in the life cycle, we can identify reliability issues sooner. These issues are not only easier to rectify but also cost less and have a far less impact on the overall performance of the products we deliver.
Over time, our software folks in the quality teams, systems teams, design and development teams have become aware of their responsibilities when it comes to reliability engineering. They have realized that the key is to work together to help improve the product under development.
In fact, this focus on reliability engineering not only helps us in identifying faults, but also in forecasting, preventing, and fixing them.
Here’s a bit more on how a reliability engineering mindset helps us deliver better products:
Requirement analysis
Contrary to popular belief, merely coding and testing are not sufficient for achieving software reliability. Requirements analysis is just as crucial. Effective requirements analysis can greatly reduce the rate of failure – early in the lifecycle. We leverage reliability engineering principles to perform accurate requirements analysis through requirements identification, software requirements specification, prototype testing, as well as risk management and control planning.
Modeling design
While developing a software systems model, we leverage reliability engineering quite significantly. We divide the system into small and recognizable modules and independently develop and handle them to have a better chance of identifying issues. We also interrelate each module and try to understand the interdependency between them to proactively detect potential reliability issues, and ensure our final design is fault-tolerant.
Testing
Possibly, the biggest benefit we achieve from reliability engineering is in the area of testing. For a start, we divide the system into modules, test each module independently and also after combining them - using integration testing. We also use reliability engineering concepts for carrying out validation testing to make sure the software meets customer expectations.
Root cause analysis
For any issue identified in the software development process, identifying the root cause of that problem is critical. Reliability engineering tools help us carry out efficient root cause analysis. Using realistic triggers, we can identify the issues, and understand the reasons for their failure faster.
Over time we have seen that much of the unreliability of a software can be attributed to the faults in the design. As more and more features get added to a product, a reliability engineering mindset helps us ensure that defects are not integrated into the design.
Metrics measurement
A successful software development project is when teams can complete the project within time and meet the quality objectives. Using reliability engineering as a foundation, we have been able to define and measure metrics that help us track how we are doing at various crucial stages of a project, vis-à-vis these parameters. For instance, failure metrics allow us to calculate the density of potential failures, while process metrics allow us to measure the effectiveness of our software development processes.
Improve competitiveness
Given the expectations of the customers of our client companies, it’s abundantly clear that in addition to performance, scalability and security, the reliability of the software can become a crucial differentiating factor.
In that context, reliability engineering is helping us carry out accurate requirements analysis, modeling design, testing, root cause analysis, and metrics measurement. That helps us develop and deliver better products that are inherently more reliable.