[kgroll]

And, as patio11 suggests, in deploying code.

From his Mixergy interview (4/30/10) [1]:

``I have a physical checklist for when I’m doing a deployment. It’s, off the top of my head maybe six commands long; one, two, three, four, five, six. I check them off; dink, dink, dink, dink, dink. And then after I do that, I have the other checklist to verify that it actually took, you know the things that I did that had the expected effect. I missed doing that once because I was exhausted at the day job and, sure enough, that was my biggest down time in four years. So I’m trying to be better at it in the future.''

[1] http://mixergy.com/patrick-mckenzie-interview/

[yummyfajitas]

True, though I generally treat such checklists as a code smell. Ideally all the items should live in your makefile.

[edit: added emphasis to the word "ideally".]

[hello_moto]

Sometime some type of technology does not not lend itself to 100% automation. So there will be certain steps that would require a bit of human intervention.

Of course, we all wish that all software is written according to the UNIX philosophy.