As a big fan of efficiency, it pains me that most of us in life sciences still execute validation testing with pen and paper, present company included. All of those poor trees. All of that hand-cramping. All of that scanning. All of those migraine-inducing QA reviews in which we’re squeezing scanned test cases into one side of our monitor and screenshots into the other so that we can compare them. (I do realize that I could print one or the other or even both, but that doesn’t work for me as a tree-loving hippie.)
And don’t forget the trips to the post office to ship all that paper to the lucky winner who gets to assemble the validation binders! Three-hole punch, anyone? Anyone? I didn’t think so. I wouldn’t raise my hand either.
Here in Perficient’s life sciences group, we’ve mostly gotten away from paper records, and that makes me happy. Our validated digital signature solution, CoSign, is both efficient and hippie-friendly. But, test execution records remain our final frontier.
We’re working on it, though. Don’t you worry. And we’ll definitely get there…because there really is no other option. With the virtual nature of the business world these days, it’s becoming too much of a burden (time, cost, human resources, natural resources) to keep shipping paper records all over the planet. The time has come for paper-based testing to head to a galaxy far, far away.
