Re: Clearing the check marks

["Gene Kim-Eng" <techwr -at- genek -dot- com>]

One of the major tenets of my previous career as
a test engineer is "familiarity breeds carelessness."
An operator who knows, or merely thinks he/she
knows, the purpose of every operation is more
prone to fall into the behavior of doing things from
memory rather than following the checklist, so there
are times when a supercritical checklist is deliberately
made to be cryptic or repetitive so that nobody will
ever be confident that they "know" it well enough to
not have to work through it step by step.

It is not the checkbox that has the "need," it is the
user.  Or, as in this case, the person the system is
going to be used on.

Gene Kim-Eng


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Boudreaux, M (GE Healthcare, consultant)" 
<MadelynBoudreaux -at- ge -dot- com>
> I have to maintain a step instructing the users to do Task A, and then
> to note that they have done Task A.
>
> Even if Task A is boring, isn't task oriented, isn't real-world
> oriented, and makes me drool.
>
> I'm assured that, due to the large amounts of potentially dangerous
> energy being used in these machines, some early i-dotting and 
> t-crossing
> and yes, box-checking, may mean the difference between whether a 
> patient
> comes out of surgery okay. Is that real-world enough for me? Yep.
>
>>It is ludicrous to attribute "needs" to checkboxes on a form.
>
> The government auditing agency disagrees, but thanks for your 2 cents.

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