Power of checklists

Airline pilots use checklist on every flight. They use checklists because one missed aircraft setting or procedure can mean the difference between safe flight and a disastrous one.

Checklists provide an excellent vehicle for making sure everything is covered and addressed.

Then why doesn’t the software development industry leverage them?

Unit and Functional Testing Checklist

This checklist contains edge-case tests that software developers tend to forget to test. Whenever someone from QA finds an issue with the code base on a particular test case, that test case should be added to this checklist.

The purpose of this checklist is that when the developer is done with the checklist, the code is essentially production ready.

Here are some items found in checklist:
* Special characters in text and numeric fields
* Min and max values range
* Missing field

Developers sometimes don’t know where to start when writing unit tests or how many unit test to write. This checklist provides a way of making sure general or specific test scenarios are included in the process of developing the software. This makes the job of the testing teams easier, allowing the testing teams to focus on certain business scenarios not covered in the checklists.

Other effective checklists:
* Developer code completion checklist
* Software release checklist