Serviceability
Serviceability is a term from both
civil engineering and
computer engineering, with different meanings.
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 collapse, the structure would be considered as having exceeded
serviceability limit states.
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
