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I find the article a bit confused about the purpose of checklists. The checklists in the aviation industry are there for the technicians (including pilots), not

by js8 8y ago

I find the article a bit confused about the purpose of checklists. The checklists in the aviation industry are there for the technicians (including pilots), not the engineers. The article seems to advocate automated checklists for programmers (who really are engineers) and not end users or administrators (who are technicians). I work on a 40 year old mainframe product and as a vendor, we provide a lot of checklists for our users (system administrators). Everything from installation and configuration to maintenance and customization is covered. This approach is an exception on the mainframe and it is virtually unknown in modern software applications. (We are not really mission-critical software, but we have a culture like that.) Could some of our checklists be more automated? Yes. But I believe today there is this strong idea in the software world that you never ever need a technician (system administrator), because everything is so user friendly and automated and reliable. So you never need the checklist either. I think this is false and there would be a benefit from stronger culture of checklists (provided by the vendor for the end user) in software.

spc476 8y ago
I have a checklist for running one of our regression tests. It's pretty robust now that four people (including myself) have gone through it a few times. I've thought about automating the test, but ultimately decided against it. Part of the checklist is just making sure the tester has the proper logins to the proper servers [1]. Second, if anything breaks in the automated portion, you need to know how it works in order to fix it. [1] yes, multiple servers. And it takes five hours to run. We've gone to length to simulate as much as possible the production environment.
jspash 8y ago
In a previous job I worked as QA supervisor for a medial robotic company. The job entailed maintaining a 1000 page spiral-bound testing manual which could be given to anyone from an intern to a senior programmer. A slightly cut-down version was shipped with every system to be used on-site by the installation technician and left with the customer to be used before any bug-report was allowed to be filed. It was most definitely a checklist with the purpose of finding and verifying bugs. But it was rarely used by the developers or engineers (that I know of) because of the implicit understanding that if something was in the checklist it was a) already a found bug and has been fixed or b) if a regression occurred, would be found by the army of QA testers. So yea I agree, checklists are used in the wild but their usefulness to coders is limited. If indeed that was what the author was implying.

by js8 8y ago

spc476 8y ago

I have a checklist for running one of our regression tests. It's pretty robust now that four people (including myself) have gone through it a few times. I've thought about automating the test, but ultimately decided against it. Part of the checklist is just making sure the tester has the proper logins to the proper servers [1]. Second, if anything breaks in the automated portion, you need to know how it works in order to fix it. [1] yes, multiple servers. And it takes five hours to run. We've gone to length to simulate as much as possible the production environment.

jspash 8y ago

In a previous job I worked as QA supervisor for a medial robotic company. The job entailed maintaining a 1000 page spiral-bound testing manual which could be given to anyone from an intern to a senior programmer. A slightly cut-down version was shipped with every system to be used on-site by the installation technician and left with the customer to be used before any bug-report was allowed to be filed. It was most definitely a checklist with the purpose of finding and verifying bugs. But it was rarely used by the developers or engineers (that I know of) because of the implicit understanding that if something was in the checklist it was a) already a found bug and has been fixed or b) if a regression occurred, would be found by the army of QA testers. So yea I agree, checklists are used in the wild but their usefulness to coders is limited. If indeed that was what the author was implying.