Operational Assurance
Our method of thinking

Operational Assurance : Plans

No plan can survive contact with a contested arena, but without a plan, no system can survive the rigors of user interactions.

The OA Plan is the collection of the OA artifacts: the Focus, Metrics, Circuits, and the Arena. Documentation is helpful, but a living document that responds to operator interaction, now that's a plan that can survive.

The Operational Assurance Plan is the documentation of the method of calculating the OA metrics, how those metrics are used in constructing OA predicates, and how those metrics are applied to the OC circuit quality metrics. The plan also describes each of the OA Foci and components that go into them. The plan describes the Operational Assurance Arena, where the system interacts with input.

Operational Assurance : Focus

Human factors, automation factors, usability, these are all controllers of systems that focus on sets of capabilities. Starting with that focus and decomposing into components, gives rise to the OA Circuit.

How many times have you been in a meeting and someone said "I didn't know my change would affect that capability?"
The OA focus is the function that a user or system exemplifies. There may be multiple focus for an OA plan, but each focus must be treated as if it was independent. An example of a focus might be "Product generates an accurate 3D rendering of a CSG model with realistic material shading."

Operational Assurance : Circuits

The OA circuit is a fundamental trace of quality through all of the components that make up a focus. An OA focus is described by its OA circuit. A circuit can be complex with many branches, but it must end in the OA focus.

Operational Assurance : Metrics

Systems are not just software, they are hardware, cryptographic elements, humans, and AI. The numbers are the key to measuring software and systems quality and raising visibility. Being able to monitor the metrics and prove their provenance is the cornerstone of success in Operational Assurance.

The OA metric is the quality metric for items in the circuit. The metrics are used in combination to create a final quality metric for a focus. The multiplicative product of each circuit member's metric is the final quality metric of the focus.

Using Zero-Knowledge methods of collection and proofs, the metrics can become nearly infallable in describing the quality of a circuit.

Operational Assurance : Arena

The Operational Assurance arena is where your focus will fail. This might be your deployment target, such as a car or on a ship or on the Internet. The arena is where the system meets the operator. Whether automated or human, the operator will put the system through a rigor that typically defies prediction. Having a complete decomposition of focus capabilities, the system can adequately quantify operator interactions and convey defects to software.

OA + MBSE

Operational Assurance matches perfectly with MBSE. You've spent hours and millions on those fantastic models, now realize risk metrics. Identify OA circuits in your models, attach risk metrics to the models, and now you have an OA plan. Pull in telemetry from your arena and now you have a real time risk predictor.