Automatic Checklists with Pull Request Templates

If you haven't read or heard of the Checklist Manifesto book, it's a great read about how a checklist can help get things right. There's a case study about how a hospital saw decreases in surgery deaths when they employed a checklist.

At my work, we employ a checklist when it comes to deploying code, which is a part of our pull request process. When someone has code that's ready to ship, they generate a pull request, which has some of these steps:

Get code review
Present staging server for stakeholder signoff
Have all stakeholders signoff
Pick deployment date/time and communicate w/ team that deployment is happening
Put site in maintenance mode and take backup
Deploy code
Make any database/configuration changes
Final testing on production
Remove maintenance mode
Communicate w/ stakeholders that code is live

You make make this checklist show up automatically with a pull request template. You would create a file called PULL_REQUEST_TEMPLATE.md and put it your project's .github folder. Looks something like this:

## Description
<!--
    Describe what this update does.
-->

<!--
    If this pull request closes any issues, please specify here. Otherwise, delete this section.
-->
Closes: #

## Testing
<!--
  Describe what testing you did for this.
-->

## Code Deployment Checklist
 - [ ] Get code review
 - [ ] Present staging server for stakeholder signoff
 - [ ] Have all stakeholders signoff
 - [ ] Pick deployment date/time and communicate w/ team that deployment is happening
 - [ ] Put site in maintenance mode and take backup
 - [ ] Deploy code
 - [ ] Make any database/configuration changes
 - [ ] Final testing on production
 - [ ] Remove maintenance mode
 - [ ] Communicate w/ stakeholders that code is live