Book details of 'Systems Reliability and Failure Prevention (Artech House Technology Management Library)'

Title	Systems Reliability and Failure Prevention (Artech House Technology Management Library)
Author(s)	Herbert Hecht
ISBN	1580533728
Language	English
Published	December 2003
Publisher	Artech House Publishers

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The Virtual Bookcase Reviews of 'Systems Reliability and Failure Prevention (Artech House Technology Management Library)':

Reviewer Rob Slade wrote:
Chapter one is a very brief introduction: almost a preface. Basic statistical measures of failure and service are described in chapter two. "Organizational Causes of Failures," in chapter three, tells stories of some major disasters, but provides no structural recommendations. Chapter four looks at analytical approaches to failure prevention, covering the failure modes and effects analysis (FMEA) and fault tree analysis (FTA) methods that should be more widely used in general risk assessment. The discussion of testing types, purposes, and analysis, in chapter five, raises some very interesting questions: if a thousand versions of a part are tested for a thousand hours and only one fails, does this *really* support the vendor's assertion that the mean time between failures (MTBF) is a million hours--or is it equally possible that all of them start failing shortly after a thousand hours, and one failed early? Factors such as partitioning, involved in implementing redundancy in a system, are reviewed in chapter six. The material on software reliability, in chapter seven, is rather disappointing: there is still an evident hardware bias, little deliberation regarding the nature of software, and the techniques for stability are limited to UML (Universal Modeling Language) analysis, which is, itself, only suitable to object-oriented tasks. Chapter eight looks at the project life cycle, the preferred development models, reliability activities in various phases, testing, and reviews. In chapter nine Hecht addresses economic considerations in preventing versus accepting failures with a good deal of math: a more practical illustration is provided in chapter ten. Chapter eleven uses the techniques explained in the book in three example cases. For those involved in risk analysis and operation continuity work, this text is a tutorial for a number of engineering principles that are not widely discussed in the available literature. However, there are a multitude of topics that sound interesting and useful, but are not presented in sufficient detail to be useful to the non-engineering professional. For those in the field, the book will definitely be worth reading, but it probably could have provided much more assistance to those in the safety and security field. copyright Robert M. Slade, 2004
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