Nora Jones on Resilience Engineering, Mental Models, and Learning from Incidents

In this podcast, Nora Jones, Co-Founder and CEO at Jeli and co-author of O’Reilly’s “Chaos Engineering: System Resiliency in Practice”, sat down with InfoQ podcast co-host Daniel Bryant. Topics discussed included: chaos engineering and resilience engineering, planning and running effective chaos experiments, and learning from incidents. Why listen to this podcast: - The chaos engineering and resilience engineering fields, although inextricably linked, are often incorrectly conflated. Resilience engineering is focused on “identifying and then enhancing the positive capabilities of people in organizations that allow them to adapt effectively and safely under varying circumstances.” - The UX of internal or engineering-focused tooling, such as chaos experimentation tooling, is extremely important. However, engineers that create these tools often overlook the value of UX, or don’t have the relevant skills in user design research to undertake this. - We all work in socio-technical systems. It is important to take the time to understand both aspects. Developing empathy and working alongside teams that you are trying to influence is essential. It is extremely important to continually work to build correct “mental models” of a system. - The before and after of running a chaos experiment is as important as running the experiment itself. However, the aspects of planning, creating effective hypotheses, and analysing and disseminating the results are often under-resourced. - Incident analysis can be a catalyst to help you understand more about your system. The Learning from Incidents website, alongside books such as Sidney Dekker’s The Field Guide to Understanding Human Error and Scott Snook’s Friendly Fire, can provide excellent background information to these topics. More on this: Quick scan our curated show notes on InfoQ https://bit.ly/2C4R6xL You can also subscribe to the InfoQ newsletter to receive weekly updates on the hottest topics from professional software development. bit.ly/24x3IVq Subscribe: www.youtube.com/infoq Like InfoQ on Facebook: bit.ly/2jmlyG8 Follow on Twitter: twitter.com/InfoQ Follow on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/infoq Check the landing page on InfoQ: https://bit.ly/2C4R6xL