Obligatory http://xkcd.com/1205/ http://xkcd.com/1205/ . Checklists are an insanely super cheap way to provide a repeatable process. They're not sexy, perhaps

Obligatory http://xkcd.com/1205/ http://xkcd.com/1205/ . Checklists are an insanely super cheap way to provide a repeatable process. They're not sexy, perhaps, but they're damn useful. There are three factors here for me: I automate things if it will save me time. I automate things if it will provide necessary reliability to the process. I automate some things which annoy me to do manually, even if I can't justify it on either of those basis. The second one is tricky. When things go pear shaped in new and interesting ways 10 points into your automatic scripts, do they correctly and automatically recover? Mine generally don't. I'm going to react better to things going pear shaped. But my coworkers don't necessarily have the same attention to detail with my checklist. This can be because they're not as familiar with the tools, or simply don't believe the rigor justified, or necessary.