André’s Reviews > Engineering Systems: Meeting Human Needs in a Complex Technological World > Status Update
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is on page 97 of 213
Confusingly, author treats "quality" as a peer to other ilities (safety, ...) rather than a umbrella term defined through ilities (safety, maintainability, flexibility, ...). He even constructed an ilities correlation network from thousands of websites and—surprise, surprise—found 'quality' at the center. Category mistake already by his own def of quality as "well made"/low tolerances (traits of ilities themselves)
— Feb 02, 2025 09:48AM
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Knowing ilities from software engineering/quality/architecture texsts, the author's multi page ilities list with random 3-sentence examples read a bit boring / laborious. There are more concise and structured descriptions (utility tree, matrix tables etc), including positive and negative relationships between ilities
I'm halfway through the book now. The actual topic seems to be just beginning. Up to this point, engineering and integrating systems history has been retold, sth about unintended consequences/short sightedness (well known examples such as asbestos, cars and traffic jams, ....). Lil systems theory which was ok, missed decomposition modes such as clustering items that change together, despite 'temporality' being an important issue in his book
(e.g. volatility-based vs functional decomposition in the software world).
Long chapter on ilities.
overall so far, it's not a bad text per se but wasn't really helpful yet, underwhelming curiosity-wise
too, not a book (yet) about "meeting human needs in a complex technological world" fomatted by structural imperatives of a capitalist mode of production, to borrow Robert Kurz' lingo... instead a book about unfolding and interplay of inventions, new needs, population growth, some greedy guys here and there
It may be that in the 1800/1900s people spoke vaguely of "quality" in the sense of manufacturing tolerances (i.e., high precision in manufacturing) ...
P.82: "The epoch of complex systems saw huge progress in terms of the four traditional ilities—quality, safety, usability/operability, and reliability/maintainability [...]"
but the author keeps using it along with lot of other ilities, e.g. with 'quality' in the center of his correlation network. Quality is usually taught as an umbrella term, and defined through other "-ilities" it will naturally appear central in such an analysis. Whole sub chapters run like this and it is always unclear what the independence of the ility "quality" is supposed to consist of in comparison to the other 'ilities' in this book