Serviceability (computer)

For other uses, see Serviceability.

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