If there is someone whom you cannot hide from, it is none other than yourself. Amazingly you don’t realize that whenever you are true to others, you are essentially true to yourself. But tell a lie, do a mistake knowingly that you think others will not know and if your conscience fights against you because you did wrong, you realize you can hide a mistake from someone but really cannot hide it from yourself.

“Feeling guilty” can be made to work for the right purposes. In fact this has really helped me a lot to correct myself and stick on to things I have committed to. Because I know if I don’t keep it up, it will slowly eat my mind, unless there is something genuine stopping me to complete the work. Instead of suffering that bite, I would rather struggle, work hard and somehow complete what I committed to finish.

Though, be aware of a couple of points that can work against you in this process and put you in a trap. The first one is the anti-theory. The anti-theory is when you constantly allow your mind to bite, you become numb and insensitive. This is very dangerous because when you become numb and insensitive, it doesn’t matter to you when you don’t do anything what you promised or committed to. That’s when you dig your own grave. The second one is, in a progressive effort to complete what you have committed to; you might sideline or give less importance to the dependencies of the task you are taking upon. There is folk tale that explains this. There was a crow which got an opportunity to taste from a trash, a sweet made of rice and brown sugar. It liked it so much that it wanted more. So the crow asked it’s wife to prepare some more for him. His wife told him, that it needs some ingredients to make it. The crow got all the ingredients his wife had asked for. Then the crow’s wife started preparing it putting all the ingredients in a pot under fire. The crow was so impatient that it asked its wife repeatedly whether it was ready. Finally when the crow’s wife said it was ready, the crow was so impatient, that it put his beak into the boiling sweet. Because the sweet was so hot, the crow burnt its tongue and could not really sense the taste. It got so furious that it took the pot and dropped it. The pot broke and the sweet got scattered around the ground going waste. The crow’s wife advised her husband to not to be so hasty. The crow realized it by tasting few drops of the sweet that remained in a piece of the pot that had become cold, but all the efforts that it took to get the ingredients and the effort that his wife had put had already gone waste.

Even though the moral of the above story is “haste is waste”, a point to take from this is that we often have tasks that depend on so many things that takes its own time to be done right. If we miss this we might say that we completed it, but the final outcome may not be what is expected and it might be a double work for someone who was expecting it from us to be right the first time. If one keeps these two points in mind and has that guilty feeling to make sure that he/she completes what is committed to on time then the person is already taken a step to be self disciplined and gains trust among people associated with him/her.

Trust is a small word but means a lot. Just try searching “define: trust” in Google and look at the results. Faith, hope, confidence, reliability, honesty, belief are few words that have close association with definition of the word trust. There is no predefined set of steps that can build trust. It is built over time as a result of your actions. Trust is one thing that others earn on you for your actions. The more others earn, it becomes easier for one to carry out his/her thoughts, ideas and propositions. Trust is also an investment. In a project team, the team leader should put trust in the team and everyone within the team should trust each other. Without an investment there are no returns, hence the first step towards building trust is to have trust in the team, then that trust returns back up the level. Here is an interesting article “Building Trust” on the Slow Leadership blog.

IT organizations build many processes during the software development lifecycle to enforce responsibility, accountability to bring in quality deliverable. More than processes the key to achieving quality deliverables is to be self disciplined. If each and every member in the team understands his/her roles and responsibilities and be self disciplined in what they are supposed to do then there is no need for enforcement of work. Ultimately it is the quality of the work that is delivered that matters and if each one is self disciplined in executing the work then automatically the quality of the work improves significantly. This is what agile tries to preach. Here is a good excerpt on self discipline from the book “Agile Project Management” by Jim Highsmith.

Self-discipline enables freedom and empowerment. When individuals and teams want more autonomy, they must exercise greater self-discipline. One of the acute dangers of process-centric development and project management is that they remove any incentive for self-discipline. When managers impose discipline through detailed processes - ‘follow this process or else’ - they stifle initiative and self-discipline. These same managers then turn around and complain, “Why doesn’t anyone around here take any initiative or accept any responsibility?” Imposed-disciplined teams gets things accomplished. Self-disciplined teams accomplish near-miraculous things.

Self-disciplined individuals:

• Accept accountability for results
• Confront reality through rigorous thinking
• Engage in intense interaction and debate
• Work willingly within a self-organizing framework
• Respect colleagues

Dialogue, discussion and participatory decision making are all part of building self-discipline. Self-discipline is also built on competence, persistence and the willingness to assume accountability for results.  Competence is more than skill and ability; it’s attitude and experience. Get the right people involved, and self discipline comes more easily. Get the wrong people, and imposed discipline creeps in, destroying trust, respect, and the egalitarian atmosphere. One reason would-be agile teams don’t succeed is that they fail to realize the self-discipline required. There is no binary switch to go from no discipline to self-discipline; it’s a journey that some individuals get right away, while others need to take a longer trip.

Well one doesn’t need any more explanation on the need for a self-disciplined team for accomplishing near-miraculous things. Are you self disciplined?

This post is part of the Foundation Stone series.

“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

Thanks to my friend Kanmani who sent me a link that has information how to be an effective programmer. In fact TechMasala’s foundation series of posts main objective is also to list down certain technical as well as soft skills to be an effective programmer. The document covers tips and best practices under the categories of personal and team skills for a beginner, intermediate and advanced programmer. “How to be a Programmer: A Short, Comprehensive, and Personal Summary” is a good read for every programmer.

In North East India there is a saying “When the bamboo flowers, famine, death and destruction follow”.  I got to know about this from a beautiful program called “Animal Planet Insights” in Animal Planet channel yesterday. When the program started with this message I was wondering how could this be possible and I was more interested to continue watching the program. The villages suffered a huge loss of human once in every fifty years until 1950’s and as per the saying every time it happened when the bamboo flowered.  A variety of bamboo that only grows in north eastern forests of India has a lifespan of 50 years and when its end comes, flowers that becomes fruits. The fruit falls down the seed within grows up as new trees. The bamboo fruit is rich in vitamins and other essentials that invite rats. These rats eat up the fruit and the natural system of a rat is that when there is plenty of food it copulates and gives birth to more rats than normally.  This multiplies the number of rats enormously.  Once there are no more bamboo fruits the rats enter into the paddy fields and eat up everything. Due to the enormous number of rats there was no way the villagers could stop them. In one night the entire paddy fields surrounding the villages are devastated. The rats don’t stop there; they enter into the houses and eat up every piece of food. Some people leave the village but most of them are stuck with famine and lose lives because of hunger. The bamboo forest cannot be destroyed because it is a source of input for various purposes in the villages.

The program continued on to explain how the villagers in the recent past came up with different ways of traps to kill the rats and reduce the number of rats during the bamboo flowering season. The program also showed other chain reactions that cause devastations like more rats invite deadly snakes. Sometimes from the onset we get easily deceived to believe something to be the cause of a problem when it is actually not.  A deep probe and trace would reveal the root cause of the problem. As another saying also states one needs to find the root cause of the problem and solve it rather than to try to treat the symptoms. Easy fixes to problems may not be an effective solution and could come back with something huge or could produce a side effect. Identifying the root cause and fixing it is the only effective solution.

Note:- This post is part of the “Foundations” series.

I was watching a renowned saint’s talk on TV three days back. During his speech, he told several stories. A part of a story inspired me and this post is based on that. Here is the excerpt from the story.

A saint was on his deathbed counting his last days.  His disciples were around and looking after him.  The disciples were always astonished with the knowledge and wisdom that their guru had and wanted to know who his guru was who might have been more knowledgeable than him.  So they asked the guru who his guru was.  The guru smiled and said that he had learned from thousands of gurus throughout his life and that he doesn’t have enough time to tell about all of them.  The disciples were persistent and asked the guru to tell at least about few of his gurus.  The guru agreed and started telling about few of his gurus and what he learned from them.

“The first guru to me was a thief.  I was in search for knowledge and was walking through a village.  It was late night and the entire village was deep asleep. I wanted to take shelter for few days in the village but at that time of the night I didn’t wanted to disturb anyone. As I walking through a small street I saw someone near a house and as I closed in, I could recognize that it was a thief who was trying to get into a house and steal. Not daring to bother about what he is doing I asked him, if I could find any shelter in the village. The thief said that there is no public shelter but then he offered that I could stay in his house provided he doesn’t mind staying with a thief.  I thought about it and really didn’t care because he is a thief. Every day the thief went in the night to do his work and returned back in the morning. Every morning he came empty handed and I would tell him he failed to steal and he would say that he will make it tomorrow. I stayed with the thief for about a month and for the entire month he was not able to steal anything but he still kept saying he would make it tomorrow.  That was the first lesson I learnt from the first guru.  A lot of times I was impatient that I am not getting enough knowledge and wisdom to carry on the saint path that I even considered renouncing it and going back to normal life. But the thief guru taught me the concept of never giving up and if I am here today it is that first lesson that I learnt has brought me up till here.

My second guru was a dog.  I was drinking water from a pool of water. A thirsty dog came by and wanted to drink the water from pool.  As he put his head down to the pool he saw his own reflection and thought it was another dog and started barking.  The reflection of him also did the same actions but the dog thought there was another dog inside the pool which is barking at him. So he stepped back and attempted again. Again the same thing happened and he backed away. This happened for few times and then I don’t know what the dog thought it jumped into the pool. Once he was in he didn’t see any other dog and started drinking the water to its content. That was a big lesson for me that taught me that if I have to become knowledgeable I have to delve deep into it, just by looking at the outset I will not be able to feed to my content.”

The saint told few more of his gurus and what he learned from them but more related to sainthood and Godliness. The first two lessons that the guru learnt are applicable whether you are software engineer or a saint. Never give up and delve deep into what you are learning.

Have a great week.

Note:- This post is part of the “Foundations” series of posts.