I mentioned in the last entry that 'worklogs',email reports of what we've done on our systems, work for my current jobhere at the university but did not really work for my previous job, tothe extent that we fell out of the habit of writing them. As it happens,I have some theories on why this happened; in fact, I think that thereare two important contributing factors, one technical and one cultural.

The first is that we have an official search interface (and

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