Operability

Operability is the degree to which a product or system has attributes that make it easy for operators to run, monitor, and control. It is a quality attribute and, per ISO/IEC 25010, a sub-characteristic of usability. Usability is generally framed around the end user, whereas operability is framed around the people who run and administer the system.

A system’s operability shows up in things like clear logging and monitoring, predictable configuration, sensible defaults, and tooling that lets an operator diagnose and recover from problems without special knowledge of the internals. It’s a concern shared with site reliability engineering, which treats how easy a system is to operate as directly related to how reliably it can be run in production.

References

• ISO/IEC (2023). ISO/IEC 25010:2023 — Systems and software Quality Requirements and Evaluation (SQuaRE) — Quality model.