{{Other uses, Serviceability (disambiguation) In

software engineering Software engineering is a branch of both computer science and engineering focused on designing, developing, testing, and maintaining Application software, software applications. It involves applying engineering design process, engineering principl ...

and

hardware engineering Hardware may refer to: Technology Computing and electronics * Electronic hardware, interconnected electronic components which perform analog or logic operations ** Digital electronics, electronics that operate on digital signals *** Computer hardw ...

, serviceability (also known as supportability) is one of the -

ilities In systems engineering and requirements engineering, a non-functional requirement (NFR) is a requirement that specifies criteria that can be used to judge the operation of a system, rather than specific behaviours. They are contrasted with functio ...

or aspects (from IBM's RAS(U) (Reliability, Availability, Serviceability, and Usability)). It refers to the ability of

technical support Technical support, commonly shortened as tech support, is a customer service provided to customers to resolve issues, commonly with consumer electronics. This is commonly provided via call centers, online chat and email. Many companies provid ...

personnel to install, configure, and monitor computer products, identify exceptions or faults,

debug In engineering, debugging is the process of finding the root cause, workarounds, and possible fixes for bugs. For software, debugging tactics can involve interactive debugging, control flow analysis, log file analysis, monitoring at the ap ...

or isolate faults to

root cause analysis In science and engineering, root cause analysis (RCA) is a method of problem solving used for identifying the root causes of faults or problems. It is widely used in IT operations, manufacturing, telecommunications, industrial process control, ...

, and provide hardware or

software maintenance Software maintenance is the modification of software after delivery. Software maintenance is often considered lower skilled and less rewarding than new development. As such, it is a common target for outsourcing or offshoring. Usually, the tea ...

in pursuit of solving a problem and restoring the product into service. Incorporating serviceability facilitating features typically results in more efficient product maintenance and reduces operational costs and maintains business continuity. Examples of features that facilitate serviceability include: *

Help desk A help desk is a department or person that provides assistance and information, usually for electronic or computer problems. In the mid-1990s, research by Iain Middleton of Robert Gordon University studied the value of an organization's help des ...

notification of exceptional events (e.g., by

electronic mail Electronic mail (usually shortened to email; alternatively hyphenated e-mail) is a method of transmitting and receiving Digital media, digital messages using electronics, electronic devices over a computer network. It was conceived in the ...

or by sending

text Text may refer to: Written word * Text (literary theory) In literary theory, a text is any object that can be "read", whether this object is a work of literature, a street sign, an arrangement of buildings on a city block, or styles of clothi ...

to a

pager A pager, also known as a beeper or bleeper, is a Wireless communication, wireless telecommunications device that receives and displays Alphanumericals, alphanumeric or voice messages. One-way pagers can only receive messages, while response p ...

) *

Network monitoring Network monitoring is the use of a system that constantly monitors a computer network for slow or failing components and that notifies the network administrator (via email, SMS or other alarms) in case of outages or other trouble. Network monitor ...

Documentation Documentation is any communicable material that is used to describe, explain or instruct regarding some attributes of an object, system or procedure, such as its parts, assembly, installation, maintenance, and use. As a form of knowledge managem ...

Event logging In computing, logging is the act of keeping a log of events that occur in a computer system, such as problems, errors or broad information on current operations. These events may occur in the operating system or in other software. A message or ' ...

Tracing (software) Tracing in software engineering refers to the process of capturing and recording information about the execution of a software program. This information is typically used by programmers for debugging purposes, and additionally, depending on the t ...

* Logging of

program state In information technology and computer science, a system is described as stateful if it is designed to remember preceding events or user interactions; the remembered information is called the state of the system. The set of states a system can oc ...

, such as ** Execution path and/or local and

global variables In computer programming, a global variable is a variable with global scope, meaning that it is visible (hence accessible) throughout the program, unless shadowed. The set of all global variables is known as the ''global environment'' or ''global ...

** Procedure entry and exit, optionally with incoming and return variable values (see:

subroutine In computer programming, a function (also procedure, method, subroutine, routine, or subprogram) is a callable unit of software logic that has a well-defined interface and behavior and can be invoked multiple times. Callable units provide a ...

) ** Exception block entry, optionally with local state (see:

exception handling In computing and computer programming, exception handling is the process of responding to the occurrence of ''exceptions'' – anomalous or exceptional conditions requiring special processing – during the execution of a program. In general, an ...

) *

Software Software consists of computer programs that instruct the Execution (computing), execution of a computer. Software also includes design documents and specifications. The history of software is closely tied to the development of digital comput ...

upgrade Upgrading is the process of replacing a product with a newer version of the same product. In computing and consumer electronics, an upgrade is generally a replacement of hardware, software or firmware with a newer or better version, in order to ...

Graceful degradation Fault tolerance is the ability of a system to maintain proper operation despite failures or faults in one or more of its components. This capability is essential for high-availability, mission-critical, or even life-critical systems. Fault to ...

, where the product is designed to allow recovery from exceptional events without intervention by

staff * Hardware replacement or upgrade planning, where the product is designed to allow efficient hardware upgrades with minimal

computer system A computer is a machine that can be programmed to automatically carry out sequences of arithmetic or logical operations (''computation''). Modern digital electronic computers can perform generic sets of operations known as ''programs'', wh ...

downtime In computing and telecommunications, downtime (also (system) outage or (system) drought colloquially) is a period when a system is unavailable. The unavailability is the proportion of a time-span that a system is unavailable or offline. This is ...

(e.g., hotswap components.) Serviceability engineering may also incorporate some routine system maintenance related features (see: Operations, Administration and Maintenance (

OA&M Operations, administration, and management or operations, administration, and maintenance (OA&M or OAM) are the processes, activities, tools, and standards involved with operating, administering, managing and maintaining any system. This commonl ...

.)) A service tool is defined as a facility or feature, closely tied to a product, that provides capabilities and data so as to service (analyze, monitor, debug, repair, etc.) that product. Service tools can provide broad ranges of capabilities. Regarding diagnosis, a proposed taxonomy of service tools is as follows: * Level 1: Service tool that indicates if a product is functional or not functional. Describing computer servers, the states are often referred to as ‘up’ or ‘down’. This is a binary value. * Level 2: Service tool that provides some detailed diagnostic data. Often the diagnostic data is referred to as a problem ‘signature’, a representation of key values such as system environment, running program name, etc. This level of data is used to compare one problem’s signature to another problem’s signature: the ability to match the new problem to an old one allows one to use the solution already created for the prior problem. The ability to screen problems is valuable when a problem does match a pre-existing problem, but it is not sufficient to debug a new problem. * Level 3: Provides detailed diagnostic data sufficient to debug a new and unique problem. As a rough rule of thumb for these taxonomies, there are multiple ‘orders of magnitude’ of diagnostic data in level 1 vs. level 2 vs. level 3 service tools. Additional characteristics and capabilities that have been observed in service tools: * Time of data collection: some tools can collect data immediately, as soon as problem occurs, others are delayed in collecting data. * Pre-analyzed, or not-yet-analyzed data: some tools collect ‘external’ data, while others collect ‘internal’ data. This is seen when comparing system messages (natural language-like statements in the user’s native language) vs. ‘binary’ storage dumps. * Partial or full set of system state data: some tools collect a complete system state vs. a partial system state (user or partial ‘binary’ storage dump vs. complete system dump). * Raw or analyzed data: some tools display raw data, while others analyze it (examples storage dump formatters that format data, vs. ‘intelligent’ data formatters (“ANALYZE” is a common verb) that combine product knowledge with analysis of state variables to indicate the ‘meaning’ of the data. * Programmable tools vs. ‘fixed function’ tools. Some tools can be altered to get varying amounts of data, at varying times. Some tools have only a fixed function. * Automatic or manual? Some tools are built into a product, to automatically collect data when a fault or failure occurs. Other tools have to be specifically invoked to start the data collection process. * Repair or non-repair? Some tools collect data as a fore-runner to an automatic repair process (self-healing/fault tolerant). These tools have the challenge of quickly obtaining unaltered data before the desired repair process starts.

External links

Excellent example of Serviceability Feature Requirements:
Sun Gathering Debug Data (Sun GDD)
This is a set of tools developed by the Sun's support guys aimed to provide the right approach to problem resolution by leveraging proactive actions and best practices to gather the debug data needed for further analysis. * "Carrier Grade Linux Serviceability Requirements Definition Version 4," Copyright (c) 2005-2007 by Open Source Development Labs, Inc. Beaverton, OR 97005 US

Design for X

See also

External links