Over the past few years, I've become a real fan of using checklists . But I wasn't always this way, and I think how I evolvedto using checklists in my work is an interesting illustration of howsmall cultural things can make a big difference.

As far as I can reverse engineer the evolution, it goes like this:

A few years ago I switched jobs within the university, moving to a newgroup . The new group had and has a strongculture of writing what we call '

Suppose that you have a program that runs another program and uses itsoutput; for example, you have a high level analysis program that runsa low level state gathering command (or several commands) to gathervarious information.Here is something that I have recently learned the hard way:

You really want to give your high level program an option to getthis status output from a file instead of by running the commands.

Doing this saves you from having to recreate a specific scenarioeach time you want to test how your