I'm honestly not that sure that checklists are useful for writing software. It's a creative process where you are making the rules, not enforcing them. It's m

I'm honestly not that sure that checklists are useful for writing software. It's a creative process where you are making the rules, not enforcing them. It's more like designing the plane, rather than flying it. Now understanding how to write good software, especially good UI for human operators to work, is a hugely underrated skill. Many accidents (air crashes, nuclear accidents, etc) are caused by poor or confusing UI. For operations, or devops, I think checklists are essential, and should be automated as scripts and dashboards. But always have the ability to do everything by hand if required, to cut out some step or modify something in a critical scenario (trust me, it always comes up, and when it does, you don't want to be shooting from the hip in a crisis). I've specifically built jenkins operations boards with a bunch of buttons to run scripts and do operations, and it works great. You also get a built in log of who's doing what when, and what happened with it. Also, just because I think it's interesting, and related to checklists, look at the Spanair 5022 flight disaster - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EruTu5O9LX8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EruTu5O9LX8 . Basically they missed a step in their checklist to make sure their flaps were at the proper setting for take off, but being distracted and in an unusual situation, they didn't run through the checklist correctly. Anything with manual steps can fail, including checklists. Preparing for these scenarios is actually I think the key here. Having the knowledge written down after you've designed a system to handle adverse conditions is just a no-brainer (although it seems like no one likes writing things down, I do!).