How to verify your protocol updates

Owned by Martin Magana
Last updated: Oct 09, 2020
2 min read

After your protocol has been updated, you will be asked to verify those changes on a test project that uses fake data. The purpose of this exercise is to ensure that these changes are well understood and will be functional before applying them to live data.

This is exercise is a very critical step in the process, as it’s usually the last time we are able to make easily make changes. After changes have been applied to the live data, it’s much trickier to change them, so please take care in completing this process.

Please following these instructions to complete the verification.

  1. Visit our app and login - https://data.pointblue.org/science/biologists

  2. From the home page, select your project and then click the link for the type of survey data you’re verifying.

     

  3. The next page will show you a list of locations available for the selected project. Select any location you would like to use. It’s best to select a location you are familiar with, if available.

     

  4. The following page is for “Visits”. Select the protocol(s) you are verifying and use the ‘Start’ button to view the survey form

     

  5. The next page will allow you to create a new survey. It looks different depending on the protocol(s) you select. Please complete the entire form, using an actual survey sheet from the field if possible. When finished, use one of the “Save” buttons at the bottom of the form to complete it.

  6. After the survey has been saved, you will be taken to the proofing page. Please review the data in the proofing page to verify that it is being displayed correctly. This is a very important step.

Once these steps have been completed, please answer the following questions:

  1. Do I see the changes I expected?

  2. Do I understand how each updated field now works?

  3. Does the proofing page display the data correctly?

If the answer to all three question is in the affirmative, then you can now verify that changes will work for your project and that we can proceed to apply these changes to live data.

In doing this, you are also affirming that these changes can now be developed against. This means they will now be a source of truth for this project and other items will be developed or updated with the assumption that they are correct and will not be changed.