Comments on: Checklist-Driven Programming

By: steve.freeman

steve.freeman — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 14:38:43 +0000

You’re right, of course. Some people in the industry have known this for a long time. We just need to keep re-reading Jerry Weinberg

By: Serhiy Yevtushenko

Serhiy Yevtushenko — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 07:34:02 +0000

I would like to add that checklist are for long time present in the software in the form of the formal inspections (And the formal inspection failed a lot for not taking into account human factors).

Also, Jerry Weinberg point out to two interesting kinds of list – checklists and laundry lists.

Checklists checks, what should be present.
And laudry list gives you a list of different items that you might have forgotten, but that might just need cleaning up.

He also mentions that while working in complex, purely structured situations, laundry list may be preferrable.

By: steve.freeman

steve.freeman — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 00:48:31 +0000

I hope not. My guess is that checklists (done right!) help to reduce the cognitive load of the basic mechanical stuff so that people can concentrate on the harder inventive stuff. I would guess the trick is to make sure the checklists keep in their (modest) place.

By: Andrew Gray

Andrew Gray — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 11:12:11 +0000

Surely not a resurgance of the “process is king” monster.

By: Comparing the 3 Buckets of Medical Science to Software Development

Comparing the 3 Buckets of Medical Science to Software Development — Sun, 13 Jan 2008 21:30:23 +0000

[...] Freeman wrote Checklist-Driven Programming about the New Yorker, Atul Gawande article that I previously compared to lean. He asks how this [...]

By: Wes Maldonado

Wes Maldonado — Sun, 13 Jan 2008 20:50:12 +0000

I wrote up a comparison of the article to lean Lean: Stopping the Line, Empowering the Individual to Affect Quality in Medicine

Drawing parallels to medical science in the article, I’ll paraphrase a bit…
If medical science fall into three buckets we can draw parallels to software… One is understanding software disease biology, edge cases, boundary conditions, provable software. One is finding effective therapies (methodologies) xp, crystal, rup, CMMI, etc. And one is insuring those therapies are delivered effectively… lean, value mapping, delivered business value.