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Engineering for Chaos: Lessons Learned from COVID-19

Published: 30 March 2021 Publication History

Abstract

The global COVID-19 pandemic has transformed the way we live, learn, and teach - impacting both "how we learn" and "what we learn." Software system resilience has emerged as a critical concept, a departure from historical system objectives obsessed with high performance. In practice, there are many situations when development focused on efficiency, creates a system that is not very resilient. Fortunately, some technology companies have prioritized stability and availability over efficiency in order to deliver to customers a more consistent experience. Governments also value resilience to reliably serve their communities in the face of crises like cyber hacking and COVID-19. System resilience is a topic often neglected in computer science curricula. This paper reports on a recent virtual ACM SPLASH-E Education Symposium panel session held in November 2020 that discussed resilience, efficiency, and the impact of COVID-19 on computer science education. The panel featured Steven Fraser (panel impresario) and panelists Rebecca Mercuri, Landon Noll, Ales Plsek, and Moshe Vardi.

References

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Vardi, M. 2020. Efficiency vs. Resilience: What COVID-19 Teaches Computing. Communications of the ACM 63, 5, (Mar. 2020), 9. DOI= https://doi.org/10.1145/3388890
[2]
Vardi, M. 2020. Lessons from COVID-19: Efficiency vs Resilience. ACM TechTalk Webinar, Oct. 14, 2020, https://learning.acm.org/techtalks/covid
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Galston, W. 2020. Efficiency Is Not the Only Economic Virtue. Wall Street Journal. March 10, 2020.
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Terlep, R.G. and Evans, M. Why Did Covid Overwhelm Hospitals? A Yearslong Drive for Efficiency! 2020. Wall Street Journal. September 17, 2020.
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What Covid-19 toilet paper shortages tell us about supply chains. Financial Times. June 7, 2020, https://www.ft.com/video/6e5acf3e-511b-48d1--948c-ff7c94f3ba1b
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Mercuri, R. 2002. Explanation of Voter-Verified Ballot Systems. The Risks Digest 22, 17, (July 24, 2002). http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/22/17#subj4.1
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Basiri, A. et. al. 2016. Chaos Engineering. IEEE Software 33, 3, (May-Jun. 2016), 35--41. DOI= https://doi.org/10.1109/MS.2016.60
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Cited By

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  • (2023)Backward design: Integrating active learning into undergraduate computer science coursesCogent Education10.1080/2331186X.2023.220405510:1Online publication date: 23-Apr-2023

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Published In

cover image ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes
ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes  Volume 46, Issue 2
April 2021
23 pages
ISSN:0163-5948
DOI:10.1145/3448992
Issue’s Table of Contents
Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author.

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 30 March 2021
Published in SIGSOFT Volume 46, Issue 2

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  1. efficiency
  2. resilience

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  • (2023)Backward design: Integrating active learning into undergraduate computer science coursesCogent Education10.1080/2331186X.2023.220405510:1Online publication date: 23-Apr-2023

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