The Diagnosis-Resolution Structure in Troubleshooting Procedures, by David K. Farkas, on the WritersUA website.
In this paper, I define troubleshooting procedures and briefly sketch out how they are developed. Then I analyze the genre’s underlying architectural structure of diagnosis and resolution, showing both simple and complex configurations of symptoms and solution methods. These configurations are in part constrained by the nature of the technical problem; but they are also the consequence of design decisions. Understanding structure enables us to meaningfully classify the very diverse instances of this genre, reveals key design issues, and is apt to contribute to experimental research insofar as structure is central to many of the most useful research questions we can ask.