Episode 95 — Details | The Engineering Commons Podcast

Brian, Carmen and Jeff discuss the role of details in engineering projects, and how one goes about evaluating, managing, sharing, and documenting critical minutia.

In the introduction, Jeff misses the detail that this podcast is published in November, not October.
Carmen doesn’t mind sweating the details, but reviewing documentation for typographical errors is not his favorite task.
It is often said that “the devil is in the details.”
We continue to look for guest and topic suggestions from our listeners, so feel free to send us a note with your ideas.
A previous guest, James Trevelyan, has written about the value of engineers, and how uncertainty reduction is an important contribution of the engineering profession.
Uncertainty is frequently treated as a statistical issue.
Brian relates a recent situation in which he burned through many hours trying to uncover a programming detail buried in the documentation.
Electronic circuits can behave badly in “high EMI” environments, where EMI stands for “electromagnetic interference.”
Jeff justifies his “pi multiplier” concept (see this podcast’s first episode) with the “cone of uncertainty” used by software developers.
It’s Brian’s opinion that engineers often fail to utilize the formal methods found in other professions when managing a multitude of critical details.
Jeff claims that engineering standards ease the burden of dealing with frequently encountered details.
Of course, as Carmen observes, the problem sometimes lies in choosing the “right” standard.
Searching a large solution space for potential design details can be a frustratingly slow process, says Jeff.
Brian always tries to have a backup plan, so he is not “checkmated” by a single detail.
The amount of documentation appropriate for each detail seems related to the detail’s expected and potential costs.
Creating a documentation hierarchy can provide needed information without overwhelming customers, notes Carmen.
Humans quickly become inured to a surplus of details (or warnings).
Brian has found modularization (it’s really a word!) to be a good means for keeping details from interfering with one another during the development process.
Software packages are available for companies wishing to implement enterprise resource planning (ERP).
Git has become very popular as a version control system.
Hardware changes can be tracked in Git using visual diffs.

Thanks to Frédéric Bisson for the photo titled “Détail de la machine à vapeur Merlin.” Podcast theme music by Paul Stevenson.

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