Resilience can be defined in many ways and is often associated with disturbances, however, resilience also refers to the intrinsic abilities a system has to function in the face of change.

Hollnagel et al.¹ define resilience as the productive tension between stability and change, always with the aim of producing systems that are “safe”. This view of socio-technical systems is pertinent to modern software engineering where change has become endemic: changing requirements, advanced technologies, complex infrastructure and new security threats. In addition to a changing environment, software production is being automated, which requires repeated re-balancing of this tension. But what is the relationship between resilience and automation?

This project focuses on socio-technical resilience of software development environments, specifically aiming to characterise how automation can best be used to improve socio-technical resilience.

^1 Hollnagel, E., Woods, D. D., & Leveson, N. (2006). Resilience Engineering: Concepts and Precepts. CRC Press.