I highly recommend this presentation by Cem Kaner (available here as a pdf download of slides). It is provocative, funny, and insightful. In it, Cem Kaner makes a strong case for using checklists (and mercilessly derides many aspects of using completely scripted tests). Cem Kaner, as I suspect most people reading this already know, is one of the leading lights of software testing education. He is a professor of computer sciences at Florida Institute of Technology and has contributed enormously to software testing education by writing Testing Computer Software "the best selling software testing book of all time," founding the Center for Software Testing Education & Research](http://www.testingeducation.org/BBST/), and making an excellent free course available online for [Black Box Software Testing. .

Here are a couple of my favorite slides from the presentation.

My own belief is that the presentation is very good and makes the points it wants to quite well. If I have a minor quibble with it, it is that in doing such a good job at laying out the case for checklists and against scripted testing, the presentation - almost by definition/design - does not go into as much detail as I would personally like to see about a topic that I think is extremely important and not written about enough; namely, how practitioners should use an approach that blends the advantages of scripted tests (that can generate some of the huge efficiency benefits of combinatorial testing methods for example) and checklist-based Exploratory Testing (which have the advantages pointed out so well in the presentation). A "both / and" option is not only possible; it is desirable.

Credit for bringing this presentation to my attention: Michael Bolton ([the testing expert](http://www.developsense.com/blog.html, of course, not the singer, ["Office Space" video snippet] , posted a link to this presentation. Thanks again, Michael. Your enthusiastic recommendation to pick up boxed sets of the BBC show Connections was also excellent as well; the presenter of Connections is like a slightly tipsy genius with ADHD who possesses incredible grasp of history, an encyclopedic knowledge of quirky scientific developments and a gift for story-telling. I like how your mind works.