Checklists are neither glamorous nor sophisticated, but that's exactly why they're useful for everything from flying airplanes to removing appendixes. By design they're simple, concise and easy to work with. So why not use them for testing software?

Our QA lead Julia Atlygina made the case for testing with checklists to a packed auditorium at the annual AgileDays conference.

The half-hour Q&A session that ensued (regardless of the solar eclipse outside, which started right around the end of the presentation) would suggest that Julia made her case very convincingly. See for yourself in the video below, or read on for a synopsis of the presentation.

Checklists are far more interesting than any solar eclipse.

Write less, test faster

The conventional practice of writing detailed test cases full of steps and expected results is slow, repetitive and cumbersome. In many situations it can be streamlined by using a condensed 'checklist' format, which makes the assumption that the tester already knows the expected outcomes and how to achieve them.

Furthermore, by not carefully prescribing the exact test steps required to produce a desired outcome, we give the savvy tester more creative freedom to throw spanners in the works and find ways to break things. In other words, we give testers greater encouragement to provoke undesired outcomes.

There are limitations to this approach, of course. It doesn't work well for those not intimately familiar with the features being tested, such as new recruits in the QA team, and for user acceptance testing it may not provide enough context to guide the process.

Nonetheless, there is a strong argument for adopting a checklist format where possible.

Not only does it fit well with the Agile spirit of things by reducing overhead and shifting the focus from processes onto individuals, it may significantly increase engagement and motivation of testers involved in an otherwise repetitive and often monotonous task.

Julia concludes her presentation with a review of the checklist management tools she investigated, and explains how her research culminated in the creation of the Testy extension for Structure.

Find out more about JIRA Agile testing with Testy, or go right ahead and take Testy for a spin on our public Structure demo where you can mess things up without getting shouted at.

In the context of internal organs, the correct plural of 'appendix' is indeed appendixes.