Measuring “ilities” is a Hopeless Task

Our society is at a turning point in the history of technology adoption, computer systems are creeping into the very fabric of everyday life. However, there is no overall framework for measuring many elements of systems, much less combining them into a system-level metrics for comparison or prediction purposes. Therefore, researchers propose the grand challenge of quantifying and measurement the ilities. The attributes of the ilities are generally agreed to be manageability, maintainability, serviceability, dependability and diagnoseability. We take the position that trying to quantity manageability, diagnoseability, serviceability, and maintainability in a general purpose way is a hopeless task. At best, any such quantification can be measured and applied only to a specific system with human factor studies. As arguments, we try to clarify the definition and characteristics of each “ility”, as well as the main challenges of quantifying these “ilities”. After analyzing the characteristics of the ilities as well as exploring the challenges of quantifying ‘ilities’, we draw a conclusion that it is impossible to quantity them in a general way, since all these ilities are the reflection of human effort and skill. The best we can do is using human factor studies to measure and apply these ilities to some specific systems. Even in this case, new and accurate metrics are needed to reflect human factor and measure ilities, and still many problems are inherently unsolvable. Although many works have been done to solve the existing problems about ilities, we will show in this paper that it is very difficult to solve these limitations which made measuring ‘ilities’ a hopeless task.