This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book describes how wear problems which present themselves. It provides a discussion of how wear problems are detected, quantified, and monitored. The book also presents the author's approach to categorizing wear or surface damage based on the type of relative motion that is producing them and their observed features or artifacts. It explains the tribosystem analysis form and how tribosystems, even relatively complex ones, can be characterized. The book examines the problem-solving options, the selection and types of information available from wear testing, and a few examples of matching the performance of large-scale tribosystems with data from simulative test methods. It reviews the role of terminology in the process, including both formal definitions and field-specific jargon. The book explores a coding system that can provide a measure of consistency and a shorthand system for identifying the type of wear.