Engineering-risk Books

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BOOK CONTENTS
01 Value-Based Software Engineering: Overview and Agenda
02 An Initial Theory of Value-Based Software Engineering
03 Valuation of Software Initiatives Under Uncertainty: Concepts, Issues, and Techniques
04 Preference-Based Decision Support in Software Engineering
05 Risk and the Economic Value of the Software Producer
06 Value-Based Software Engineering: Seven Key Elements and Ethical Considerations
07 Stakeholder Value Proposition Elicitation and Reconciliation
08 Measurement and Decision Making
09 Criteria for Selecting Software Requirements to Create Product Value: an Industrial Empirical Study
10 Collaborative Usability Testing to Facilitate Stakeholder Involvement
11 Value-Based Management of Software Testing
12 Decision Support for Value-Based Software Release Planning
13 ProSim/RA - Software Process Simulation in Support of Risk Assessment
14 Tailoring Software Traceability to Value-Based Needs
15 Value-Based Knowledge Management: the Contribution of Group Processes
16 Quantifying the Value of New Technologies for Software Development
17 Valuing Software Intellectual Property

More information on this topic can be obtained at http://sunset.usc.edu/cse/pub/research/valueroi.html.

The book is benefited from a rich research background of the author,who is a reasearcher in MIT,in the quality management field and refelects her experiences of doing research in dealing with variation problems in the product development of some leading world manufacturers. The book is unique in comparison to other books in the area of design for quality in the respect that it proposes a well integrated framework for managing risks associated with sources of variation in product development. This framework gives a very good structure to the book and in each chapter explains elements of this framework in detail. The book is very good in totality and the concreteness of the proposed framework but do not discuss the introduced tools in enough details. Specially in the variation mitigation part of the framework, which I think is the most important part, the reader is left without deatailed enough tools to utilize in real world problem cases. However the book is very rich in the sectiones for indentifying sources of variation and the Key Charactristics are very well explained and integrated in the framwork.

These poems are stunningly beautiful. They are simple enough to grasp immediately, but as you reread them, the depth is overwhelming. The poems are crisp, there is a beautiful tension between love and woundedness. This is a book that I have given often as a gift and I continually reach for it myself.

An outstanding book for any field of engineering responsible to deliver projects in on schedule and under budget. Book is filled with examples from all areas that ease comprehension and make the book enjoyable to read. Specifically enjoyed the treatment of risk as more than the classic "potential to do harm", but also includes "opportunities for gain." The chapters on cost and schedule risk management are refreshing, informative and through the use of examples allows the concepts to be easily applied. At times the book can be whimsical, adding to the readers enjoyment. I most strongly recommend this book to engineers who want to sharpen their engineering and project management skills.

Excellent collection of information about failed quality assurance programs and human performance errors. Disasters discussed cover a wide range industries from construction to space exploration. If you are researching what causes disasters, this is the book.

Chiles gives a vivid journalistic account of various accidents and disasters. The writing style is easy and popular -he clearly intends to reach a broad audience. He generally does this job well.
The main weakness of the book is the absence of an overarching framework, or theory if you like, that could help the reader assimilate all this information, structure it, identify some concepts or themes that recur. Or at least explain to the reader why Chiles found this particular selection of accidents so interesting that they deserve mention in his book. Chiles is quite candid about this lack of purpose: "When I began this project some friends asked what anybody could boil out of the huge variety of technological disaster we've seen. I didn't know." (p277).
Therefore, the title's promise of "Lessons [learned?] from the edge of technology" never really materialises. The stories are told well, but the lessons remain fragmented and fuzzy. The book is not particularly useful in actual accident prevention work.

While generally well written, at times, particularly in the second half of the book, Chiles goes an association or two too far. More than once, I was left in a mild state of confusion. Other reviewers have also mentioned this problem.
The book gives a fragmented account of various disasters. If you prefer depth over breadth, you won't like this book. If you are interested in a popular account of various disasters, you may enjoy it.

But why not spend your time better reading truly fantastic books on the subject of learning from [bad] experience. Read Henry Petroski's To engineer is human, Aaron Wildavsky's Searching for safety, Daniel Maurino's Beyond aviation human factors, or some of the books by James Reason, Trevor Kletz or perhaps Scott Sagan. There is plenty to choose from.

This is an interesting book consisting of a large number of engineering disasters and near misses. Each is treated with a brief investigative story explaining what happened and generally why. Most of the disasters are very large, such as the Piper Alpha and Bhopal and thus are the most dramatic and hard hitting. The Concorde on the cover is not a prominently examined example however, which was slightly disappointing to me being an aerospace engineer.

For the lay reader this is an elucidating set of stories that many will find intriguing. For the practicing engineer it is more a reminder of the importance of safety, considering failure paths, incorporating safety systems, designing within the constraints of human capability squarely in mind, etc. However it really is a book from a pop-interest TV show. Although subtitled "Lessons from the Edge of Technology" the lessons are the simplest kind that would be discovered on a 1 hour TV episode with commercials, such as after the Piper-Alpha incident revealing: sea water and electronics don't mix. It's not a good theoretical or reference source for learning about safety in engineering design, but is a good motivator for learning why it is important for engineers and regulators to know and implement such things.

This book and Charles Perrow's "Normal Accidents" are required reading. We live in and around complex and dangerous technologies which fail for known reasons. Understanding the lessons Chiles presents will help you understand your world and survive it better, whether you're an engineer or just a potential victim.

Having read through this book twice in five years and beginning again is a refresher in keeping focused on safety. Anyone that has anything to do with safety should read this book. From a car tire vibrating to red smoke at a nitro plant, you will start thinking differently, logically. Being able to catch a pending disaster and stop it is key to survival. This book teaches us to slow down, don't rush designs, to calm down and think when we are faced when problems that do not make sense. I suggest reading the book, presenting the stories in meetings for discussion. It will increase the safety awareness in you life.

Five stars for bravado and shameless self-promotion. The Guardian reported on the astonishing faked rescue of Jessica Lynch as long ago as May 2003 [!] including the fact that military video producers based their made-for-TV "rescue" on the story line and production techniques in Jerry Bruckheimer's fictional "Black Hawk Down." That is, Jessica Lynch's "rescue" was in fact inspired by a movie. Wow. How stupid are we?

It has been clear for nearly four years that Mr. Al-Rehaief's reward for his part in the staged rescue was asylum in the US and a big book contract. Hey--knowing how grim the situation in Iraq has become--how the American war has devastated civil society and led to a civil war--can you blame Mr. Al-Rehaief for grabbing a ticket out of a hell on earth?

If I taught journalism classes, I would use this book as an example of how effectively governments have learned to use media to hoodwink citizens. Shameful, sad, and cynical--what a perfect document for the war in Iraq.

This book was an extraordinary look at the life of an Iraqi citizen and the trials he went through before he found JL in the hospital and what he and his family went through after. For those who don't think very highly of JL, you won't read much about her in here. It was a very fast read and hard to put down. Kudos to the author for putting his life and the lives of his entire family on the line to save an American life.

So many reviews seem to center around whether the events were true or not or with they agree with Lynch's account. (Their paths only cross for a matter of minutes in the book so I don't know how much there is to dispute. Only a 3rd party witness could confirm.) I can say about the book that...
- It was hard to put down.
- It was more about the author's life than her rescue. I enjoyed this intimate look at an Iraqi's family life as much as the rescue.
- It seemed at times too fantastic to be true but that may be simply because my everyday life is a cozy one in America compared to the author's in Iraq.
- Some of the atrocities are hard to read about. I don't think this would be appropriate reading for young children.

This book is destined to be a classic, in several genres. If you start reading it, be sure you can afford the time to read it all the way through -- it's hard to set down. The opening is intense, yet the reader's hope that that level might be sustained is exceeded -- the story just keeps getting more gripping.

It's an adventure story, history, humor, sociology, a spiritual journey, and a patriotic work all together (it'll make you proud to be an American).

Mr. Al-Rehaief has done more single-handedly to redeem the Arab culture than all of the rest combined.

Update: On April 29, 2003, Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge announced that Mohammed Odeh al Rehaief, his wife, and their 5-year-old daughter had been granted humanitarian asylum in the USA.

Said Lynch's father: "The man is an angel."

Being a Shiite Moslem, Mr. Mohammed Odeh Al-Rehaief has been a first-hand witness to savagery throughout his life. In his home city of Nasiriya, he had been an attorney, and was a wealthy man whose extended family owned properties and businesses. Yet, this did not shield him from the corruption and brutality of Saddam Hussein's Iraq.

Who would ever have imagined that an Iraqi citizen would knowingly risk losing everything, including his own life and the lives of his family, in order to save one soldier; a soldier whose country was then engaged in bombing his city to pieces. Here, however, we are forced to believe it, simply because we know that it is true.

It has been pointed out that Mr. Al-Rehaief is given but brief mention in her own book, but the fact is that Pfc Jessica Lynch does express that she will be forever grateful to him. That she does not recall the events as he describes them should come as no surprise, since she was barely conscious of anything except pain during her captivity. By Pfc Lynch's own admission, it is unlikely that she would be alive today if it had not been for the efforts of this Iraqi civilian, and his success in reaching the US Marines, stationed outside the city as they continued their attack.

Maybe it is through his family that we can glean some insight into the character of Mr. Al-Rehaief and where his strong moral values originate: As the book ends, the rest of his family, headed by his father, the son of a sheikh, are waiting in international limbo, not knowing what will happen to them next. They have lost everything. Yet I detect no sentiment of regret, complaint or accusation in their descriptions of the hardships caused by the loss of their entire way of life. Such unselfishness seems unfathomable, but again we are forced to believe it, simply because it is true.
Who among us...?

In less than 200 pages, Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister manage to put together a very well-written text on risk management that vastly outshines other books of the same genre that are many times its size. Much of the ground that the authors cover in this work can be categorized as how to integrate "evidence-based decision making" into project management, although DeMarco and Lister do not explicitly use this term. The Prologue and Appendix A of this book, consisting of only 10 pages, are worth the price of this book. These two small segments discuss what the authors term "the ethics of belief" - on what basis does one believe? Because technology projects are often sited as high-failure-rate endeavors, in order to increase the success rate of project completion estimates one needs to honestly assess risk in terms of the evidence available. The Prologue simply states that "the business of believing only what you have a right to believe is called risk management", and that this discipline needs to guide the efforts of project managers through periods of uncertainty. Appendix A furthers this principle by indicating that "it is wrong...to believe anything upon insufficient evidence". The pages between these two segments walk the reader through such topics as the cases for and against risk management, quantifying uncertainty, core risks of software projects, and the tie between value and risk. Throughout "Waltzing with Bears", the consistent, superb use of graphs and simple line diagrams to support the material is unparalleled. Just like "Death March" (see my review for that book), I highly recommend this work to everyone involved in technology projects.

The book comes in handy, at a time where we are facing quite some challenges in a large IT project.

Hardly. I'm not sure what the definitive source on risk managment for software projects is, but this isn't it. Not even a good primer.

At a certain fundamental level, projects are about how well one manages the risks in the process of achieving the project objectives. Projects by their very nature and scope of effort entails some level of risk (major or minor), but unfortunately the concept of recognizing and managing the risks is sorely absent in majority of IT projects. And for those of us who have been involved in IT projects, this book is a stark reminder of how poorly risks are managed.

I found this book very useful in understanding the thought process behind risk management and more importantly the challenges and difficulties in implementing them. I have seen projects where Risk management is nothing more than symbolic maintenance of a risk log, which is more "CYA", than anything practically useful. Ofcourse, many other projects don't even maintain this token log too.

There are some striking observations in this book, which is commonsense, but gets lost in the thicket of our daily project management duties.
One of them is about the project delays:

"When a project strays from schedule, it's seldom because the work planned just took longer than anyone had thought; a much more common explanation is that the project got bogged down doing work that wasn't planned at all.
Most software project managers do a reasonable job of predicting the tasks that have to be done and a poor job of predicting the tasks that might have to be done."

Another one is about schedule estimates:
"Software managers have tended to follow a standard rule: The Estimate and the goal are identical. The discipline of risk management though will counsel you to use goals as you always have to help people strive for best performance. At the same time, it will prompt you to use a very different planning estimate when making promises to your clients and management.

Schedule = Goal = N -> Really dumb equation

Schedule > Goal > N -> Sensible (N =Nano-estimate)"

THis is so true. It always happens that whatever is the earliest
articulated date of completion automatically is considered the deadline, which is most of the time unrealistic and working against this timeline makes risk management even more impossible.

I woulf recommend this book to anyone intrested in reading about some common sense advice related to IT project management in general and Risk management in particular.

Read this unsystematic and occasionally glib book (I concede this point to other reviewers) and you will suddenly realize that you, your colleagues in development, your technical leads, and your CEO have probably all been lying to yourselves and to each other about every single "milestone". Risk analysis is not merely done badly most of the time. It's usually not done at all. I learned enough from this book on a Sunday to return to work the next day and successfully persuade my colleagues that our project plan was worthless, and we needed to come up with a new one *now* that properly took account of the risks. No, I'm not a risk analyst, but merely the effort of thinking about risk in a different way had a payoff. Before this, we were just driving blind.

I bought this book 2 years ago based on reviews, along with a few other SC books, out of personal interest and my career needs to build depth in this field.

Dr. Simchi-levi's book is fantastic in that it is the ONLY book where a novice, mid-career, or a dept head can all benefit from reading it. The way he writes the book is so straightforward, balancing applicable usage and concepts and theory. Most SC books are either too light on the applicability, or too light on the theories. Not this book.

My latest role had me running the entire country supplychain. We shipped >100m units / year directly to customers in an online division. I find myself picking this book out of my shelf and reading it casually over coffee and it still brings refreshing perspectives.

Read it in 10 min sessions, 4 hour sessions, or use it in school. No other book are as flexible and as valuable than this one. If your work involves SC (and today's global economy is more so than ever), you should invest in yourself with this book.

I gained so much respect for Dr. Simchi-Levi from reading his book that I flew to Shanghai to meet him last year at a forum. Buy the book, read it (it's compact, even hardcover), enjoy it, and benefit from it.

Words can not explain how much this book is valuable. Its pragmatic approach to supply chain is wonderful. I am sure any reader will have the same idea after reading this book. I really appreciate this great job. Special thanks to the authors.

This book one of the rarest ocasions in SCM field when you read a book and enjoy its contents to the fullest. I agree with ine of the other reviewers that this is one of the BEST books about SCM. I highly recomend it as one of MUST have SCM books.

I have this book as my text in the Business program at the University of Phoenix. I am not a supply chain manager and do not aspire to be, but it is a required course. Some of the math is a bit daunting (the phrase "using simple calculus" is an oxymoron to many) but even without knowing calculus the case studies and discussions convey the fundamentals effectively.

Visually, the book is also good, with a layout and graphic design that makes reading easier and not at all a strain on the eyes. That might not seem important when you are shopping for a text, but when you are reading the third chapter of the day sometime between supper and midnight, it will!

Good as a text book for an MBA program but I needed something concise and clear. I'll keep looking

As a software developer, you know that one of the critical period in a project is when you try to make integrate your code in the overall application and push it towards the final user. It is sometimes a long process that you would like to accelerate so that you could obtain a quicker feedback on the quality of your code. This book written by Paul Duvall, with Steve Matyas and Andrew Glover, will help you improve the way you build and deliver software.

After a initial presentation of the continuous integration (CI) concepts and objectives, the content of the book goes far beyond the simple "continuous build" aspect to cover all disciplines concerned by CI: risk management, configuration management, database evolution, software testing, inspections, deployment. It is clear that CI is just not installing a suite of tools, but is mainly changing software development practices and process. Each chapter is well structured with practical examples related to real life situations. The book reach also nicely the objective of maintaining a balance between a somewhat tools- and language-neutral position, but still giving enough practical advice so that you could quickly adapt the advice to your own software development environment. Final appendixes give valuable information on CI resources and evaluating available CI tools.

Finally, you can get more and updated information on continuous integration and download book's chapter two from the Web site associated to the book: http://www.integratebutton.com

Any software developer who has spent days in 'integration hell' handling a complexity of software components will appreciate the invaluable information in CONTINUOUS INTEGRATION: IMPROVING SOFTWARE QUALITY AND REDUCING RISK. From the initial concept of CI and its practices to over forty CI-related practices from database integration to development, this book covers the entire cycle of CI development and surveys all kinds of events, repetitive processes, and more. An outstanding guide any serious software development library needs.

As Martin Fowler says in his foreword to this book, all of this information is available on the internet. However, that should by no means demean the value of this book. This is an extremely readable and well-organized presentation of this important development practice. Often the organization and comprehensive analytical thought are themselves important contributions to a given topic, and that is what Duvall, et al deliver here. Highly recommended.

If you have not been exposed to continuous build/integration, this book covers the approach along with the advantages and points you to some references.
However, if you already have an understanding of CI or have decided that you need to set up a CI environment, this book doesn't add much: few details, little discussion of fine points, etc. That is, don't buy this book if you want concrete help setting up CI.
There is quite a bit of repetition (how many times does one have to list the advantages of CI, or a dedicated build machine, or whatever?).
I found Ant in Action (Manning) much more useful: both in providing the motivation for CI, explaining fine points, providing examples, and in breadth (even if "Ant in Action" is nominally about a Java build tool).

This book is an excellent overview of why Continuous Integration is important and about more than just compiling frequently. The book helps you to understand why to do CI, what you can do beyond building, and how to do it. In addition to general principles, the book points you to some excellent tools and resources. This book is an excellent companion to Software Configuration Management Patterns: Effective Teamwork, Practical Integration; it provides teriffic information that support the build patterns in that book. You might already know some of the information in this book, but it is worth buying if you need to encourge CI in your organization for the clear discussion of why CI matters and the for the detailed advice on how to implement it.