Serviceability

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Serviceability is a term from both civil engineering and computer engineering, with different meanings.

[edit] Civil engineering

In civil engineering, serviceability refers to the conditions under which a building is still considered useful. Should these limit states be exceeded, a structure that may still be structurally sound would nevertheless be considered unfit. It refers to condition others than the building strength that renders the buildings unusable. Serviceability limit state design of structures includes factors such as durability, overall stability, fire resistance, deflection, cracking and excessive vibration.

For example, a skyscraper could sway severely and cause the occupants to be sick (much like sea-sickness), yet be perfectly sound structurally and in no danger of collapsing. This building is obviously no longer fit for human occupation, yet since it is in no danger of collapsing, the structure would be considered as having exceeded its serviceability limit state.

[edit] Computer engineering

In software engineering and hardware engineering, serviceability is also known as supportability, and is one of the -ilities or aspects. It refers to the ability of technical support personnel to debug or perform root cause analysis in pursuit of solving a problem with a product. Examples of features facilitating serviceability include:

• Documentation
• Support desk notification of exceptional events (e.g., by electronic mail or by sending text to a pager)
• Logging of critical state, such as
  • Execution path and/or local and global variables
  • Procedure entry and exit, optionally with incoming and return variable values
  • Exception block entry, optionally with local state
• "Graceful degradation" planning, in which the application is designed to help the user to recover from exceptional events without intervention by technical support staff