The Difference Between Procedures and Checklists
The aviation industry is often credited with inventing checklists. These tools have become essential for ensuring that systems are set up and functioning correctly in high-stakes environments. However, there is another concept in aviation that is equally important – procedures. Both procedures and checklists play vital roles in the safety and efficiency of aviation, but they serve very different purposes.
Procedures: The Foundation of System Understanding
Procedures are comprehensive instructions that guide pilots through every step of the flight, from the moment they step into the cockpit to landing the aircraft. These procedures are detailed and take into account the system setup, the pre-conditions for each flight phase, and the required actions in various scenarios. Importantly, procedures are based on a thorough understanding of the systems by the pilots.
This deep system understanding is critical because pilots need to know not just how to follow instructions but why these steps are necessary. Pilots are not the only personnel who rely on procedures. Anyone working on or around an aircraft – from ground crew to engineers – has a set of procedures to follow, ensuring system safety and effective operation at all levels.
Checklists: Verifying Critical Settings
On the other hand, checklists serve a different purpose. They are designed to verify that the most critical settings of the system are in the correct state. Checklists ensure that no essential step is missed, but they do not replace the procedures or the training. The checklist is a final check to confirm that everything is in place according to the procedure – they are a verification tool, not a replacement for procedure or training.
The training pilots undergo is designed to help them deal with specific situations – whether simulated or real – while also helping them to understand the "why" behind every action. This training also involves observation and feedback to help pilots improve their performance in a real-world environment.
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Applying This to the Automotive Industry
The automotive industry, particularly in system development, is not as standardized as aviation. Nevertheless, there are steps that have been agreed upon by the industry, particularly when it comes to safety-critical systems. However, I have observed a growing emphasis on checklists in the automotive sector, especially during assessments. While checklists are important for ensuring compliance, procedures – the fundamental guidelines for developing systems – are often neglected.
In the absence of a proper procedural framework, developers may find themselves "flying the aircraft" without clear guidance, filling out checklists for the sake of the checklist itself rather than understanding their purpose. This reduces the value of assessments to little more than a theater – a formality with little real impact.
How Can We Solve This?
To address this gap, the industry needs to develop and emphasize procedures as guidance for developers. These procedures should provide a structured approach to system development, ensuring that developers understand how to build safe, reliable systems and why each step is necessary.
In addition, it’s essential to offer training that focuses on motivation and understanding, rather than merely completing checklists. Developers need to be shown the big picture: why they are following a procedure and how it contributes to the overall safety and quality of the system. Without this, we risk developing products that meet the minimum requirements but lack the understanding necessary to ensure long-term success.
Conclusion
In both aviation and automotive industries, procedures and checklists serve important but distinct purposes. Procedures guide the team through the development process, while checklists serve as a final verification to ensure nothing critical is missed. To improve the development of safety-critical systems in the automotive industry, we must shift focus from merely ticking off boxes to developing comprehensive procedures that provide clear guidance and proper training to developers, helping them understand the why behind every action they take.
Having worked as a pilot in commercial aviation and automotive software development I would like to opine differently! Checklists, as used by pilots, are to make sure a status has been achieved: a switch flipped, undercarriage extended; flaps set as per speed. The procedure provides the instruction at each step on the way to the checklist point: after take-off checklist requires that air speed is correct, flaps retracted, undercarriage retracted, engine power correctly set, etc. etc. . The order is (mostly) important, as one system can affect the behaviour of other systems: you do not want to retract the undercarriage before taking off but you might want to reduce engine power in noise sensitive areas before reapplying increased thrust to climb! And flying is also dear to my heart as it helps me to create analogies of the difference between state, mode, and phase when discussing functional safety. Now, we could set up checklists for automotive software, but we usually don't for mundane procedures such as saving, compiling, linking, and regression testing the software. It is normally a black box of clicking a button to build. Checklists do come into their own when manually releasing software (heard of CI/CD).