Jan 2009
Bob Martin tweeted this link to an article about the effectiveness of checklists in surgery, like a pre-flight checklist a pilot would use, and asked what sort of checklists the agilist could take advantage of.
I was reminded of a checklist of test heuristics published by Elisabeth Hendrickson I ran across some time ago. I couldn't find it - Lisa Crispin helped locate it for me, and I wanted to blog it here so I could find it faster next time.
Nov 2017
This recent Hidden Brain episode covers the topic of checklists. Excellent examples of how legislating checklist conformance doesn't work, and letting a bureaucracy overload a checklist ruins its effectiveness. It's a powerful tool as long as it's humbly submitted to by caring professionals.
Another thing to keep in mind, that all of the tests in your test suite also act as an automated deployment checklist for every piece of functionality the tests have been coded to verify. Even if you have a slow test suite (which isn't fun), just imagine the time it would take to manually re-verify all of those pieces of code. (In some orgs, you don't have to imagine if they have a really large QA department that manually attempts that).
tags: ComputersAndTechnology
