Comment by tjic | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tjic | Hacker News Reader

I did a 3 month contract gig with a local robotics firm a while back. I developed a few cool features for them, but the reason they fell in love with me was that I worked up extensive testing checklists. During testing I'd be the one with the checklist hardcopy (printed out from the internal wiki) in my lap and a walky talky in one hand.

"Range safety officer, do we have your OK? Safety driver, do we have your OK? Safety driver, throw the switch to manual. Safety driver, is steeting calibrated? Remote operator, unpark the robot. Remote operator, confirm feature X is turned off. Safety driver, confirm vehicle feature Y is on..."

Without the checklist, a trial-and-error run through of a certain feature took 3 hours. With the checklist we could do it in 3 minutes.

I came back from an intense demo of the robot to third parties and decided to decompress in my woodworking shop...and next to my lathe was a checklist I had written up a while earlier on how to make a certain Christmas stocking stuffer

http://smartflix.com/projects/3

...which is when I realized that there's something about checklist that permeates my personality!

I think it is a completely personality issue. Just like their desk, some people like to keep things tidy and organized and know whats next all the time, while some people seem to thrive in a bit of messiness, creativity and improvisation and getting things done first.

When it comes to jobs that require originality and creativity, a checklist is not going to be productive. In a job that is more operational, predictive and repetitive, then a checklist would help.

When it comes to software engineering, the job is semi-structural (you are bound by certain conventions, languages, computer science principles), and semi-creative (you can use your imagination in a lot of places).

For QA types, a checklist is a must. For pure new feature programing, a step by step checklist is basically a creativity killer. Crap in, crap out.

I personally distaste checklist, and try to avoid artificial constrains as much as I can.

I often use lists in the development of a new feature, and do not consider it a creativity killer. Start with an insight, and break it down into simple steps or components. If this list is crap, it is obvious at that point and can be scrapped and the process can be tried again. For me the creative aspect of a feature is the original insight, and it is usually easy to judge a proposed implementation against how well it achieves that insight.

I think you are mis-assessing the value of a checklist for creative work. I think medicine involves a considerable amount of creative problem solving for example. And yet the use of checklists to manage basic techniques has an enormous positive impact on patient outcomes.

More fundamentally, not every aspect of a task or project requires creativity or needs to be reinvented each time. To the extent that there are good practices it speeds you up to encode them in a checklist so you can free your mind to focus on the creative aspects.

Doctors were quizzed, "Do you want to use a checklist?", they answered, "No.". "Do you want someone who is operating on you to use a checklist?", they answered, "Yes.".

If you read the book you'll find that almost everyone hates checklists but when used they cut down on mistakes and human error. The surprising discovery is not that they work, but the reluctance of people to use them...

Test suite == automated checklist

Reply on news.ycombinator.com