My code review checklist

I am not a fan of checklists (especially for code reviews). Code review checklists start small and then slowly become really large and unwieldy. After sometime checklist becomes a bottleneck and instead of improving effectiveness of your process, these lengthy checklists start reducing the effectiveness. 

However, there are situations where I used checklists and they worked very well. For example, a Customer Release checklist. There are many small small things that you need to do before sending the new release to customer. Its easy to miss few critical steps. A release checklist has always worked very well.

I was not sure why in typical organization sometimes checklists did not work well (for example, in cases like code review) while sometimes it really worked. What exactly is the difference ?

Sometime back I read Atul Gawande's book 'Checklist Manifesto'. It triggered my interest in Checklists again. As first step I extracted a Code Review checklist from my code review training content. I have used this 'mental' checklist for a many-many years. It has worked well for me even with different programming languages (C/C++, Java, Python, C#, Javascript) and technologies. 

Here is my code review checklist.

Code Review Checklist from Nitin Bhide

PS :  Based on my experiences, information from Atul Gawande's book and from information internet, I have now prepared a 4 hour hands-on session on creating and improving the checklists. Contact me if you are interested.