“Quality in computer software is a controversial field. For some, software quality is a largely aesthetic and practical issue, dealing with the question of how efficiently and elegantly a computer program performs a task and source code looks (see Programming style). For others, quality is defined as strict conformance to requirements and absence of bugs. In both cases, there are sets of practices that are either required, or highly useful in this pursuit.”

That’s an introduction to software quality on Wikipedia. While I was agreed upon that description, I had some realization and thought around that word recently. This happened after my visit to a friend’s place in the United States last week. My friend wanted to meet a relative of hers and asked me to join her. We went to her relative’s home and after some introductions they offered us to show around their house. The first impression I got was this house must be new. Apparently my friend had the same question (this was her first visit too) and it came out of her mouth as a question. I was wrong and they were living in that house for some time now. I realized the saying “Cleanliness is next to Godliness” looking at that house and how it was maintained. Sparkling clean with each and every object placed properly and positioned properly. The credit goes to the mistress of the house and from further discussions we understood it is her passion to keep things in order every day. Her in-law quoted that she is so particular about things in proper place and positioned properly and was explaining with a tooth brush holder which had to be positioned parallel to the walls and not tilted sideways. The closet looked like a cloth shop.

The visit had an effect on me and made a lasting impression. I started feeling that the essence of quality can only be realized with some attitude. It is an attitude of perseverance, an attitude of trying to be a perfectionist, an attitude of being passionate about the work being done, an attitude of being adamant about doing right things the right way. When these characteristics show up in work, that is the evidence of quality. A common proverb in India says, you just need to crush a rice to see if the entire pot of rice has boiled or not. A quality work shows up on its own. Quality is also not about having a check once in a while but it is something that needs to be practiced on a day to day basis. When each member in the team has these quality attitudes, then the team is a quality team. When each team in the organization has these quality attitudes then it is a quality organization. Think about it, do you have these characteristics in you?

My other Foundation Stones

We all know that we cannot eat a water melon in one mouthful but to break them into pieces, remove the seeds and skin and then share and eat the fruit. Similarly the work we do might look complex, big and not solvable from the onset. I was watching a Discovery channel program on Siafu ants (pinching ants) which is a common ant type in Africa. These ants would eat everything in sight that moved. They eat mice, scorpions, spiders, anything that comes on their way and the local people say even elephants sometimes. They would kill and eat dogs and cats if they were trapped in the house also. The warrior ants have big claws that can tear off the outer skin of the victim and the rest of the ants swarm in and tear the soft inner flesh. These march in thousands and thousands and are nomads that shift the colony once in two weeks. Here is the best part, these ants are totally blind. They rely on touch, smell and chemical signals from the abdomen of the leading ants. The swarms can travel at up to 20 metres per hour, stripping all animal life in their path.

Think about the collaboration, team work and best of all the strategy of attacking in pieces but in huge numbers. The victim is outnumbered and is soon captivated. The whole episode was mind boggling just like watching a thriller movie. I could not take my eyes off the whole hour. The commercials did give me time to think about the lesson learnt through these ants and I thought this is an analogy I can share with you. Working as a team with good communication and collaboration and applying the divide and conquer rule can help in tackling huge problems so easy that you would want more.

Note - This post is a part of foundation stone series of posts

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Mon.itor.us is a new web based monitoring tool that can monitor web sites, servers, visitors etc. with personalized interactive interface, where you can add server performance and availability tests, get uptime reports, track visitors, check CPU, memory and other systems resources, add contacts to get the alert notifications. I am thinking of Google Analytics here which can also do some tracking but it is more a visitor statistics tool whereas Mon.itor.us is more from resource statistics. Every web application will need a heart monitor to make sure it is going healthy and not running out of gas. The service providers could provide some of that stuff but you might want to check it out then and there. Rather than going into the box and trying to figure it out or contacting the provider Mon.itor.us will enable you to check the status online. What I see as additional bonus is to monitor the health of applications and servers internally too with the help of a smart agent installed on the servers. The agent communicates with the Mon.itor.us and the statistics is available online. But you might be thinking why to expose your internal resource statistics, well it’s not exposed to the public world but only you as a registered user can access it. On the positive side I think it is a great tool to quickly utilize for resource monitoring. What’s more it notifies when something goes wrong. It has a great look and feel and usability too.