The Checklist: A Simple Tool for Improving Software Quality

In software development, simplicity often goes hand-in-hand with higher quality. Among the large number of tools and methods available, there is one simple practice that consistently delivers: The Checklist.?

Checklists have been game-changers in aviation and medicine for many years, ensuring repeatability, clarity and error avoidance in high complexity environments. Whether your role involves safety-critical software development or non-safety software projects, checklists can dramatically improve efficiency and quality.

Why Checklists Work

No one is immune to mistakes. A checklist acts as a ‘safety net’ for your processes, ensuring nothing important gets missed.

In all projects, oversights can (and often do) happen. That’s where checklists can help by providing the following benefits:

1. Error Prevention: No one is immune to mistakes. A checklist acts as a ‘safety net’ for your processes, ensuring nothing important gets missed.

2. Consistency: Teams are aligned around standardised processes, ensuring consistent outcomes. Whether your team is delivering requirements, generating architecture, creating code, testing, or any other critical step in the software lifecycle process, a checklist ensures everyone is on the same page and working in a consistent manner.

3. Better Collaboration: A good checklist provides transparency, helping to align collaborating teams and reducing misunderstandings.

4. Risk Mitigation: Checklists highlight critical items and risk factors and help the team identify issues earlier.

5. Efficiency: Following clear, well structured steps saves time. This is especially useful during handovers from one team to another.

6. Knowledge Preservation: Teams change and people leave organisations, often taking knowledge with them. Checklists capture critical knowledge ensuring better continuity in projects and higher quality work products.

How to Create Useful Checklists

It’s easy to get checklists wrong. Overloading them, making them too complex or too vague can cause more problems than they solve. To ensure they work effectively, follow these key points:

1. Keep It Simple: Don’t overwhelm users with unnecessary checks and details. Prioritise the most critical checks and use simple language.
2. Regularly Review: A checklist should improve and mature over time. Regularly refine it to keep it relevant.
3. Train The Team: A checklist is only useful if people actually use it and, importantly, understand its value. Make sure the users understand ‘why’ the checklist exists before then training ‘how’ to use it.

Where Checklists Fit into the Development Lifecycle

In the aviation industry, checklists are not only used for emergency situations. They’re also an essential part of everyday ‘normal’ operations. These can include routine everyday tasks such as engine start, pre-takeoff and pre-landing checks (see fig.1 below for examples). Regardless of their experience level, pilots rely on these checklists to ensure every critical step is completed at each stage of the flight, recognising that even the most experienced professionals can easily miss a key step.?

By systematically following checklists, pilots mitigate the risk of human error, reinforcing the idea that consistency and thoroughness are critical for maintaining the highest safety standards. This standardised global practice used by all pilots shows that, even in complex, safety-critical environments, tools as simple as a laminated paper checklist can still be highly effective in protecting lives and maintaining operational excellence.

Taking this learning from aviation, we can see that checklists are not just for uncommon or emergency events. They also enhance quality and provide consistency during typical everyday workflow steps. From initial requirements generation through to testing and final sign off, checklists can significantly improve every stage of a typical software development lifecycle.

Try checklists to boost your team’s effectiveness

When working in complex environments, it’s easy to overlook simple tools. In technology driven industries, a checklist may feel basic, old-fashioned or unnecessary. However, the simple checklist ensures that tasks are not just completed, but completed with consistent high quality. For better collaboration, higher quality, fewer errors and improved efficiency, the checklist could become your team’s new and most underrated asset.?

Try asking your team which areas of your existing process or which handover activities between your teams suffer from regular issues. Then create a basic checklist with the aid of the team members experiencing these issues. You might just be surprised how well it works!

Copyright: Sam Price, 2025