Is a quick calculation really?

So many engineering calculations are what we call “quick-and-dirty” or “one-off”, and usually performed on our old hand calculator or in a throwaway spreadsheet.  Might just be converting units, or applying a simple rule-of-thumb.  We wonder if such calculations are in fact quick, or even one-off.  We don’t doubt that they are dirty!

One-offs are almost always trial-runs for “doing it right” later.  They are quick because we aren’t too worried about precision, nor about documenting what we did.  We’ll use an approximate conversion factor, and maybe just make up provisional values for parameters we don’t have in front of us right now.  Nothing wrong with that, it has stood us in good stead for ages and helps us get a handle on things.

But what about the “dirty” part?  Obviously, doing it quick now, and right later, spells extra work.  Being light on precision and documentation means we’ll have to figure it all out again.  Or worse, we might find that our quick-and-dirty results find there way into downstream work  (Maybe we’ll never even know when that happens).  In the end, we’re pretty sure that one-off’s are dirty, and wonder if they are really quick after all.

The tradeoff is between meticulous care and agility, and we have always needed to opt for agility even it adds overall cost and uncertainty downstream where we need to verify and validate our way to engineering quality.  The goal of truenumbers technology, simply put, is to break this tradeoff by making it easier to do “quick-but-clean” one-offs than it is to do the old “quick-and-dirty”.

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