The Tough Sell of Resilience Engineering

We provide an argument for why current Resilience Engineering (RE) tools are unlikely to see widespread adoption, and recommendations for making more adoptable RE tools. Resilience engineering continuously grows in popularity, and various RE tools have existed for years; however, we have found that convincing technology development teams to use RE tools is a “tough sell” for a variety of reasons. We synthesized insights and lessons learned from interacting with numerous technology development teams and the scholarly literature on RE. We then analyzed a set of RE tools through the lens of these insights, and we developed a cohesive and analysis-driven argument for why RE tools are a tough sell, and, more importantly, we developed recommendations to improve future tools. We found that challenges for adoption of current RE tools by technology development teams include RE tools that 1) require too great a level of effort, 2) have unobvious value, 3) require the technology to already exist, 4) have a scope that exceeds agency of technology developers, and 5) do not readily generate relevant systems engineering artifacts. Different underlying factors shape or constrain the solution space; however, there are several recommendations for developing RE tools that are more likely to achieve widespread adoption by technology developers. This research is directly applicable to RE practitioners seeking to have greater engagement with technology development teams. Further, this work is likely generalizable to develop any kind of participatory tools for human-centered design.