Re: [Axiom-developer] Software Checklists and Quality

[Eugene Surowitz]

Once upon a time in the land of HAL,
I had to nursemaid thirty systems that were to be
kept or brought up to a common level.
Since they had to intercommunicate,
level differences were not tolerable.

There was a multi-page list of procedure steps,
to be performed in sequence but was never called a checklist.

The most important thing experienced was that the steps
could never be followed in exactly the same way two times in a row.
Each update would vary something that required updating
and modifying the list.  Not the pilot's type of list.

But it did perform a form of knowledge capture and enabled
bring other people into the fold, which I think is what we
would like to do.

Cheers, Gene


On 12/27/2014 12:23 AM, address@hidden wrote:
> I took flying lessons. My instructor was a complete fanatic about
> checklists. I learned their value in that context. For example,
>
>     Landing Checklist: Wheels down and locked?
>
> Checklists matter a LOT. People do forget.
>
> It never occurred to me that they could be applied to programming.
> This article
>    http://www.solipsys.co.uk/new/SoftwareChecklist.html
> expresses the idea that they ought to be applied in software.
>
> There is a nugget of the checklist idea in the regression tests
> but it isn't fully formed and reified as "checklisting". Some of
> them are encoded in Makefiles but not in an explicit form.
>
> Years ago I started a "release checklist" to make sure I did all of
> the steps necessary to pre-check a new release. I thought of checklist
> as a crutch for my bad memory rather than an encoding of knowledge.
> I'm now trying to encode the list into a continuous integration system.
>
> Given the blog post, I feel that the idea of an explicit effort of
> creating, maintaining, and automating checklists could do a lot to
> improve the quality of Axiom.
>
> Comments?
>
> Tim
>
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