The Scientific Method for Testing System Resilience

Christina, what is the focus of your work these days?

Right now, my primary focus is the staffing, onboarding and subsequent education of site reliability engineers for Vanguard. So I handle everything from what it means to be a site reliability engineer in the day-to-day, what tools and technologies they'll need to be familiar with and how to best get them up to speed. But also on where are we going to find these SREs, and how many do we need to find and where should we be putting them within our organization?

What is the motivation for your talk?

Share the story of a practice we've adopted at Vanguard across the organization, in particular in areas where we have site reliability engineer staff to do the work. Share the story of the failure mode and effects analysis practice where it started, which had many, many challenges, lots of bumps in the road to the various iterations to make the practice better and then share the value that we've derived from making this practice a step for the majority of applications going into production for Vanguard. And I'll share all of the frameworks to make sure that all of the attendees of this presentation can repeat the successes that we've seen at Vanguard in their own systems at their companies.

And how would you describe the persona and the level for the target audience?

I think that the right audience for this talk is anyone who is in the position of maybe a technical lead for a software system. Oftentimes, the people involved in the conversations that make up a failure modes and effects analysis are technical leads, architects, or senior engineers who can look at an architecture diagram and ask the right questions, interpret what they're seeing and make suggestions for how to improve the architecture to make it more resilient.

What do you want this persona to walk away with from your presentation?

I hope that anyone attending my presentation will feel confident taking what they've learned about the failure modes and effects analysis technique and even chaos experimentation, and be able to bring that back to their organizations, to the software systems that they are building and apply it to their own work so that they can reap the same benefits I have.