Experts in a range of business and social fields discuss different aspects of the concept of failure and how it relates to a variety of settings in today's society - including business, education, social history, psychology and the public services.

Success good, failure bad? Each holds the germ of the other. They are more alike than you think.

The theme for the 2019 conference is Novel Computing Architectures. Papers will include discussions on the advent of Artificial Intelligence and the promise of quantum computing that are driving disruptive computing architectures; Neuromorphic chip designs on one hand, and Quantum Bits on the other, still in R&D, will introduce new computing circuitry and memory elements, novel materials, and different test methodologies. These novel computing architectures will require further innovation which is best achieved through a collaborative Failure Analysis community composed of chip manufacturers, tool vendors, and universities.

Celebrating Failure is the definitive how-to manual for leaders seeking to embrace the power of failure as a learning tool to improve their organizations and achieve ever-greater goals. The business world (and, lately, the political arena) is convinced that the number one topic is change. Heath posits that it might well be failure, because if you do it right, failure can become a launching pad for change.Heath contends that "positive failures" are not only necessary steps on the path to success, but encourage greater freedom to take risks in pursuit of one's life goals. This counter-intuitive but powerful title includes:•Engaging stories of real-life business and personal failure experiences.•Practical steps to apply each chapter's "lessons" and change your approach to risk-taking and failure.•Positive, effective ways to eliminate the "fear of failure" that can hold you back in today's competitive, fast-changing world.Heath's insightful stories lay out his own failures and reveal his human side as a son, father, athlete, and business leader.

Regression testing is a widespread practice in today's software industry to ensure software product quality. Developers derive a set of test cases, and execute them frequently to ensure that their change did not adversely affect existing functionality. As the software product and its test suite grow, the time to feedback during regression test sessions increases, and impedes programmer productivity: developers wait longer for tests to complete, and delays in fault detection render fault removal increasingly difficult. Test case prioritization addresses the problem of long feedback loops by reordering test cases, such that test cases of high failure probability run first, and test case failures become actionable early in the testing process. We ask, given test execution schedules reconstructed from publicly available data, to which extent can their fault detection efficiency improved, and which technique yields the most efficient test schedules with respect to APFD? To this end, we recover regression 6200 test sessions from the build log files of Travis CI, a popular continuous integration service, and gather 62000 accompanying changelists. We evaluate the efficiency of current test schedules, and examine the prioritization results of state-of-the-art lightweight, history-based heuristics. We propose and evaluate a novel set of prioritization algorithms, which connect software changes and test failures in a matrix-like data structure. Our studies indicate that the optimization potential is substantial, because the existing test plans score only 30% APFD. The predictive power of past test failures proves to be outstanding: simple heuristics, such as repeating tests with failures in recent sessions, result in efficiency scores of 95% APFD. The best-performing matrix-based heuristic achieves a similar score of 92.5% APFD. In contrast to prior approaches, we argue that matrix-based techniques are useful beyond the scope of effective prioritization, and enable a number of use cases involving software maintenance. We validate our findings from continuous integration processes by extending a continuous testing tool within development environments with means of test prioritization, and pose further research questions. We think that our findings are suited to propel adoption of (continuous) testing practices, and that programmers' toolboxes should contain test prioritization as an existential productivity tool.

Archival snapshot of entire looseleaf Code of Massachusetts Regulations held by the Social Law Library of Massachusetts as of January 2020.

Archival snapshot of entire looseleaf Code of Massachusetts Regulations held by the Social Law Library of Massachusetts as of January 2020.