Software Diagnostics and Observability Institute

From control and systems integration to security and resilience

PDF: https://www.dumpanalysis.org/files/History_of_Diagnostics_Observability_...

An engineering system may continue to deliver its expected output while its controller compensates for a deteriorating condition. The visible result can conceal a loss of margin. To understand such a system, we need to connect its behavior with the evidence available and the decisions made from that evidence.

In History of Diagnostics, Observability, and Debugging in Engineering Sciences, we follow these connections from early engineering models and recorded measurements to feedback, state estimation, systems integration, and automated diagnosis. We examine how the boundaries of an investigation change when machines, software, people, and organizations participate in the same event.

Security Engineering introduces the possibility that an adversary has altered the system or the evidence used to investigate it. Resilience Engineering directs attention to the capacity to sustain and adapt performance under changing conditions. Both require us to examine the arrangements through which observations become explanations and explanations support action.

Seven parts and 35 chapters connect documented developments with our pattern-oriented approach to diagnostics. Selected accident investigations show how feedback, operating authority, and recovery affect the interpretation of technical evidence. A worked pumping-station example brings physical diagnosis, software debugging, security analysis, and resilience into one investigation.

Supported by 83 references, a selected chronology, glossary, and evidence taxonomy, this history examines how engineers acquired the means to investigate interacting systems—and how those means themselves became objects of diagnosis.