Software Diagnostics Institute

Browsing through the pile of the “old” unread Communications of the ACM magazines we found an article “A Closer Look at Attention to Detail” about “another non-technical skill fundamental to success in IT beyond communications, interpersonal, and leadership skills” (Communications of the ACM July 2005/Vol. 48. No. 7, pp. 87 – 92).

The reason why it caught our attention was that we already thought about it in the context of software diagnostics, initially as various common mistakes, anti-patterns, and style. Some of these can be considered as attention to detail patterns (ATDP), and we are working on the attention to detail pattern catalog.

Although according to the article, some view this skill as a personal quality and some as a skill that can be improved, we view it as a general skill everyone has but with varying domain dependent levels. It can be taught if its level is very low and improved if already present. Individuals have degrees of this skill depending on a domain of activity: for example, a person may be good at business or people management attention to detail but somewhat lack that skill when it comes to technical matters and vice versa. So domain specific facets of that skill may be improved over time through training and self-education and reinforced via auditing feedback. This is especially true in software support environments that require a different skill set than software engineering.

Analysis pattern orientation facilitates this attention to detail through various pattern catalogs and checklists from software execution artifact collection to writing diagnostic analysis reports including analysis audits.

The ACM article also lists various definitions and views of attention to detail from quality, accuracy, correctness, “not overlooking anything” and conscientiousness to “a firm grasp of what’s going on”. Here, for the latter, pattern orientation applied to software internals may help too.

Regarding the importance of attention to detail (ATD), we would like to quote the referenced ACM article: “ATD is most important in the analyst role where ‘the details’ are analyzed and evaluated. The challenge is frequently putting details in context and knowing what needs to be analyzed and when enough analysis has been completed”.

We also think that organizations that don’t emphasize this skill are not good at attention to detail.