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                             Level 3 Diagnostics

> Early in my career I worked on military flight data recorders, including
> the development of the software for the F-22's "black box". Those systems
> have SBIT, IBIT, PBIT and MBIT sub-systems were BIT is "built in test" and
> S = startup, I = initiated, P = periodic and M = maintenance. I remember
> making the Star Trek diagnostic joke myself when I was assigned the SBIT
> work.
>
> Each BIT does varying level of testing based on it's runtime budget but
> there are a lot of very basic tests that don't make much sense until you
> see your first field report of some register bit "sticking". Its much
> better to ground a plane that can't add 1+1 than to find that out in mid-
> flight.
>

“Hacker News comment [1]”

This comment (one out of many comments [2] about testing critical software
[3]) really hit home, especially given the testing currently going on here in
the Ft. Lauderdale Office of The Corporation (with the Monopolistic Phone
Company, who's mantra seems to be “it's your fault we're not ready for
testing!”). While I would love to order a Level 3 Diagnostic [4], alas, our
software is not written with such diagnostics in mind (and given the
difficulty we've seen from the other side it's clear their software isn't
either).

In fact, I'm having a hard time even figuring out what a “Level 3 Diagnostic”
would even mean in the compoent I wrote, much less every other component
involved with “Project: Sippy- Cup [5].”

Reading up [6] on SBIT (Startup Built-In Test), IBIT (Inititated Built-In
Test), PBIT (Periodic Built-In Test) and MBIT (Maintenance Built-In Test) sub
systems, it seems that it's really only applied to avionics and possibly
automotive computer systems. The closest thing to it is the POST (Power-On
Self-Test) [7] that most PC (Personal Computer)s do when powered on, which
seems to be the functional equivelent of SBIT. The rest, IBIT, PBITand MBIT,
not so much.

Out of all the components in “Project: Sippy-Cup,” only mine has an explicit
“health-check” function built in (which just basically says, “Yes, I'm
running” and that's it) which is close to PBIT(from my understanding);
everything else is queried for known data at fixed intervals. But diagnostics
seem to be “search the logs and/or configuration for for anomalous behavior.”

Sigh.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9642610
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9640086
[3] http://motherboard.vice.com/en_uk/read/how-is-
[4] http://www.startrekfreedom.com/wiki/index.php/Diagnostics
[5] gopher://gopher.conman.org/0Phlog:2014/03/05.1
[6] http://static1.1.sqspcdn.com/static/f/702523/9277204/1288926206343/2006
[7] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power-on_self-test

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