My father runs a flight school, and over the years I’ve met more than my share of private pilots.  A lot of them fly aerobatics, which involves taking a perfectly good airplane, flipping it upside-down, and performing feats that are not intended to make my mother particularly calm. It’s a fascinating little subculture, and a few years ago I spent a weekend at an aerobatic competition in upstate New York, hanging out with the pilots and generally poking around. What struck most was how safety conscious all of these pilots were. For one thing, nobody took off without going through a simple checklist of key flight safety operations.  They were all expert pilots – one had flown with Chuck Yeager in the Air Force in the 1950s – and had taken off thousands of times. And they did the checklist every time.

More recently, checklists have become a big deal in medicine. The best layman’s introduction is Atul Gawande’s 2007 New Yorker article on the subject. The short version is that by making a list of simple steps, and following those steps every time, you can eliminate “never events” (like taking out the wrong kidney), and dramatically cut a lot of other risks as well. It sounds like a no-brainer, and it probably is. But checklists have met with a surprising amount of resistance, which are nicely summarized by the following two clips from the penultimate episode of NBC’s “ER”:

And the punchline:

It’s network television, and so it’s a bit over the top – but my surgeon and medical resident friends tell that the attitude of the lead surgeon is pretty typical – and that without a champion in the room, the checklist won’t get used. I’ve observed this myself when visiting ORs – checklists were completed, but they were completed after the procedure was over, when the nurse had a few minutes to spare (so my colleagues don’t go after me, I should say that this was not at a Harvard teaching hospital).

So they’re good for pilots, and good for doctors and nurses. And, of course, they’re good for just about everyone else. They’re definitely good for EHR deployments, and for decisions about personal health planning. And they’re good for software development, too. Over the last few months I’ve written several checklists to govern different aspects of our software design, review and deployment policies. We’re all smart people, but we’re not going to remember everything. Over the next few weeks I’m going to share some of the software development checklists we’ve developed, and I hope readers will pitch in with their own ideas.