[ncmncm]

We already know the most effective way to reduce, and often eliminate, medical mistakes: rigorously applied checklists. They are still used only here and there, years after this was well demonstrated. It is well past time to treat not rigorously following checklists as negligent malpractice.

Medicine depends overwhelmingly more on manually applied procedures that would be automated, in a computer, as patients and staff manifestly are not. So, the same mistakes are repeated again and again. A software fix would correspond to changing a checklist.

Still, it would be no bad thing to use checklists for manual processes in software development, but I have never heard of any.