

Ask HN: A good text on applying FMEA to sw projects? - Pamar

During a chat (started here on HN, btw) about one of my job problems someone suggested looking into  FMEA (Failure mode and effects analysis) to try to diagnose what the main causes could be.<p>Can anyone suggest a good (and concise) book on the topic, especially with a software angle?
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matt_s
Not sure if there are books specific on that. I picked it up as part of Six
Sigma training.

The concept is you list all the possible failure modes in one column, then
score the severity (1-10, 10 most severe), occurrence probability (1-10, 10
highest probability), and detection probability (1-10, 10=lowest probability)
in other columns. Multiply those to rank the risks and then list out ways to
improve or fix the risk, etc.

A software angle would be listing ways your application would fail, or go down
to lower level components inside the app.

A tricky concept with the scoring is the detection piece. If you don't have a
good way to detect the failure then it ends up being really high ranking. I
typically used 1,5,10 for the scores since ending up in a debate about is it a
6 or 7 or 8 is a waste of time.

Once you work on improvements for a failure mode, like additional logging for
an NullPointerException, then adjust the scores.

If you are doing TDD, this would be a good way to identify areas to build
testing coverage.

~~~
Pamar
Thanks - yes, there are a few books devoted to the topic:
[http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-
alias%3Dst...](http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-
alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=fmea&rh=n%3A283155%2Ck%3Afmea) \- hoped to
find someone who could provide suggestions about which one to pick.

