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Ralph Mowery

In article ,
says...

The people who work for me fall into couple of groups on troubleshooting.

One is in the camp of: It's a brand XXX model 123 so it's always a faulty output relay. They're right a lot of the time and that reinforces the approach. When it's wrong they're lost.

Another is: Gather all the data, check everything, avoid a diagnosis until the last moment. These guys are slow but get it right. I've maybe got one like that.

The most common though is to make the diagnosis too soon and then exclude all data that doesn't confirm it. I try to keep these guys away from expensive equipment but there's no way to fix their approach. It's not that they ignore conflicting data, they can't actually see it.

I like to think that I fall in the middle of that.

When working on equipment, about 90% of the time it will be the same
part that fails. For example at work there was a piece of equipment
that had a relay in it that often failed. It just plugged in.
Instead of taking time to think about it, I would put in a new relay.
Takes about 10 seconds. If that failed to fix the problem, then out
comes the test equipment and circuit diagrams to do the trouble
shooting.