In a previous job I worked as QA supervisor for a medial robotic company. The job entailed maintaining a 1000 page spiral-bound testing manual which could be gi

In a previous job I worked as QA supervisor for a medial robotic company. The job entailed maintaining a 1000 page spiral-bound testing manual which could be given to anyone from an intern to a senior programmer. A slightly cut-down version was shipped with every system to be used on-site by the installation technician and left with the customer to be used before any bug-report was allowed to be filed. It was most definitely a checklist with the purpose of finding and verifying bugs. But it was rarely used by the developers or engineers (that I know of) because of the implicit understanding that if something was in the checklist it was a) already a found bug and has been fixed or b) if a regression occurred, would be found by the army of QA testers. So yea I agree, checklists are used in the wild but their usefulness to coders is limited. If indeed that was what the author was implying.