I was working through some intricate programming yesterday and observed that I should put in some input consistency checking before turning a workflow over to the production system. My guess is that in complex workflows, that kind of automated checking would cut down on errors enough to be very worthwhile.
Don't know how much of the OODT software does that kind of checking, but it might be interesting to see if it would help. Even better would be documentation of cases where it did. This kind of work is like the help my Ada compiler provides in detecting errors such as type inconsistencies and violations of interface consistency. That kind of error checking really improves my coding productivity. I've even gotten in the habit of building exception handling right into my standard code construction and testing work. Each module (i.e. subroutine) returns a Boolean variable labelled 'OK' and a string called 'Err_Msg'. That makes it easy to figure out where things have gone wrong, including diagnostic notes on values of key parameters (sort of like "Err detected when x = 0 in routine `check input'. It seems like a bother sometimes during code writing, but it saves a lot of time after development moves on and some new error crops up in the previous code after you've forgotten the details. Bruce B.
