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by jpitz
2528 days ago
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>Checklists are not bad, but they are to be executed by humans. I disagree. People employ checklists precisely in the situations where it is most critical that every step be executed, in order, as written. The airline industry flies on checklists. >I think trying to automate an existing human process directly is a mistake. Human processes often have features that only humans can do, such as pattern recognition or adapting to small difference. It's often easier to create a computerized (automated) process from scratch than to try to account for all the edge cases that humans might have to deal with (and do without problems). Now, you're letting perfect prevent you from ever attempting the good. TFA is explicitly about building a checklist that can morph the automatable steps into automated ones. |
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I am not arguing against checklists per se. At work, I work on (a rather old) software product which also largely runs on checklists. (Various installation and maintenance procedures are described by a checklist.)
> Now, you're letting perfect prevent you from ever attempting the good.
No. I just, based on my experience with checklists, argue that they are often poor starting point. Often they rely on abilities of humans to execute them properly.
For example, the checklist might read "edit this text file and add this and this line after line that is like this". This is difficult to automate correctly - the proper way might be perhaps to generate or keep a correct copy of the text file so automation can pick it up.
Humans are good at adapting checklists for the purpose at hand, computers aren't. That makes (human-oriented) checklists somewhat difficult to automate.