I did a 3 month contract gig with a local robotics firm a while back.  I developed a few cool features for them, but the reason they fell in love with me was that I worked up extensive testing checklists.  During testing I'd be the one with the checklist hardcopy (printed out from the internal wiki) in my lap and a walky talky in one hand.<p>"Range safety officer, do we have your OK?  Safety driver, do we have your OK?  Safety driver, throw the switch to manual.  Safety driver, is steeting calibrated?  Remote operator, unpark the robot.  Remote operator, confirm feature X is turned off.  Safety driver, confirm vehicle feature Y is on..."<p>Without the checklist, a trial-and-error run through of a certain feature took 3 hours.  With the checklist we could do it in 3 minutes.<p>I came back from an intense demo of the robot to third parties and decided to decompress in my woodworking shop...and next to my lathe was a checklist I had written up a while earlier on how to make a certain Christmas stocking stuffer<p><a href="http://smartflix.com/projects/3" rel="nofollow">http://smartflix.com/projects/3</a><p>...which is when I realized that there's something about checklist that permeates my personality!