Checklists and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
It’s late-February and the nights are still lingering far too deeply into the early mornings here in Massachusetts. There is hope though and Spring is just around the corner…and so are days out on the road on my Harley. She’s been blissfully slumbering in the garage through the winter and before we ever venture out beyond the driveway, she needs a thorough maintenance review. Since forgetting to perform some types of maintenance could be the difference between a joy ride to a restaurant, and a tow ride to a mechanic, I need a way to keep track of all the different checks I need to perform. In my opinion the best way to ensure that reliably? A checklist!
While routine motorcycle maintenance may not have many things in common with the software development life-cycle, the use of a checklist is one of the things they should share. As with my finely tuned machine, your process flow and code review must also meet certain criteria before leaving the garage. Custom checklists, tailored to your workflows, are integral to making sure those items are being taken care of. Lighting? Check. Requirements documents? Check. Brakes? Check. Code syntax? Check. Without a checklist, you never quite shake that uneasy feeling that you might have missed something, whether it’s improper tire inflation that could lead to a blow out and a dangerous situation, or a poorly coded array that leads to a memory leak and an application crash when your users are trying to submit their payment method.
What makes a good checklist? In my case, decades of user experience from motorcyclists who’ve come before me, checking their machines time and time again, refining and adding to their lists as new innovations and upgrades are brought to market for their bikes. The same process holds true for developers too. Coders will have their own checklist items that can range from styling and variable naming, to commenting, documentation, and security. Moving beyond the development team and into quality assurance, checklists can be implemented for proper controls for code releases; making sure testing has been properly done, documentation is complete, and versioning is correct, just to name a few items. Checklists aren’t static either. Over time, they are added to, or cleaned up and refined, as processes change and adapt to new requirements. Collaborator’s checklist functionality is very robust, can be easily tailored to your current process, and applied to individual templates for each of your development and quality teams, giving them their own unique requirements.
Along with good maintenance practices—helped along with my checklist—my Softail still needs to pass its own review with a second set of eyes. The state requires an annual inspection to ensure my bike is road worthy. Your code and documents should be no different. Getting that second set of eyes on your code through a Collaborator Peer Review helps to ensure that you don’t hit the road with a potentially catastrophic failure.
Don’t find yourself stranded on the side of the road, staring down the tailpipe at the added cost of getting carted off to the garage to face expensive repairs, because something simple was overlooked. Build out your checklist, put Collaborator Peer Review into your workflow, and arrive home with a bug-free smile! Safe and happy riding!
