Gluu Glossary

Checklist

A checklist is a simple informational aid that reduces failure by compensating for the limits of human memory and attention, helping people carry out a task consistently and completely.

The humble to-do list is a basic checklist – a set of items to verify, check, or inspect. More rigorous versions show up wherever the cost of a missed step is high: pilots’ pre-flight checklists, QA in software engineering, pre-surgery checklists in hospitals.

Checklists are easy to dismiss as too simple to matter, but the evidence says otherwise – they’re often the difference between success and failure in tasks where success should be routine. Tying them to scheduled, recurring tasks in your process documentation, rather than leaving them as static documents, is what keeps them actually used.