ABSTRACT

Design Review (DR) activities present many opportunities for using checklists. Checklists supposedly originated in England as a means of counting off voters on Election Day. Use of in-house technologies is a key consideration when evaluating design quality. Suppose, for example, that environmental tests reveal a soldering defect in a printer circuit. DR looks at in-house technologies as they affect performance and functions, manufacturability, serviceability, and cost effectiveness. Each of these characteristics is in turn covered by a list of review items. Checklists have been used extensively in artificial intelligence since its early days, specifically in building expert systems, databases, and knowledge bases. Most conventional checklist formats are incompatible with computer databases and knowledge bases, so the check items need to be reorganized into a hierarchical, network, or relational data model. These checklists of the future will comprise a powerful element of expert systems used for reliability engineering.