Gregory Woodhouse wrote:
> On Mar 25, 2006, at 5:01 PM, Joseph Dal Molin wrote:
>
> > ....and...at the risk of stating the obvious there should be some
> > mechanism for evaluating the certification authority and the
> > criteria...
> >
>
> Sadly, I don't know how many people are even thinking in those terms.
> What we are discussing here is software quality (meaning fitness for
> a particular purpose), and it may well be that people with the
> appropriate expertise are not well represented in this process.
> Worse, the current standard (in medicine, one might say "standard of
> care") in this area is heavily biased towards testing and informal
> (if any) requirements definition. Formal methods, automated proof
> systems, rigorous specifications, and so forth are all thought of as
> rather esoteric or "academic" (purposely using what Guy L. Steele
> perceptively called horror quotes in his thesis!) I know I've written
> correctness proofs for no reason but to satisfy myself that an
> algorithm I developed was correct. It's not such a terrible thing.
> Perhaps medicine is an area where we ought to start thinking about
> setting aside industry standard practice and thinking in terms of
> more rigorous methods of validating softwares -- which, after all is
> used in patient care!
Certainly formal quality assurance mechanisms for health-related
software should be used where possible and reasonable, but it must also
be remembered that the practice of medicine itself is, at worst, guided
by a tradition of what seems to work as recorded in textbooks and handed
down by traditional teaching, and at best by "evidence based practice"
which relies on meta-analyses of observational studies which have all
sorts of design and execution flaws, or on (hopefully double-blind) RCTs
(randomised controlled trials) which typically have very limited
generalisability to wider populations.
Tim C
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