Dream Big (Zero Defects)

Ever dreamt of building a software with "ZERO" defects? Well, that was precisely the learning that I had out of the training that I underwent the last couple of days. I was excited about the training for many reasons. I was learning a lot of new things in terms of leadership, quality ideas and it was not the normal Quality training where the trainers talk only numbers and forget how to incorporate the daily engineering activities into it. It was a fresh initiative taken from the folks at Motorola, Bangalore and it was really good. They drove their point very neatly with team exercises to emphasise the learnings and they did it without using big-time conceptual words like Six Sigma and Black Belts.

Across organizations and the average software engineering pool, Quality is related to filling up the final audit sheet with bogus numbers so that the numbers do not look too good and at the same time they do not look too bad as well. Managers tend to stick onto deadlines and push the quality aspect out of the window. Reasons could be like improper estimation, go-to-market kind of projects where the customer has all the say.

So, Quality is considered to be an overhead. We forget to understand the concept that building a quality product in the first place could have saved us a lot of effort and cost in that incurred in the later stages. If we tend to believe that we cut the villain (read “D E F E C T S”) at the early stages itself, we could have a smooth ride and the numbers would automatically fall in place on the audit sheet.

Here is a brief summary of the learning that I had. All the below aspects are the day to day routines that we come across, it is nothing drastically new. But the key is in believing that “Zero Defects” is possible and setting it as a goal on an individual space. Without a team belief and team discipline to bide by it, it would be difficult to achieve the same.

<- Dear reader, this content has been deleted for official reasons. Though the basic idea behind the content was to share knowledge, it was pointed out by my employer that it might be a case of letting out confidential (training) property. Though the deleted section was an outline of the recommended practises, I respect their view and am bound to remove it. I am sorry to all those who visited this link especially to know more on specific software quality engineering practises. - Kamz, 14 June 2006 ->

I now believe in whatever that has been shared here and would encourage you to follow it as well. It will definitely help – be it an individual or be it a team. I guess as a team we could and we should revolutionize the average processes followed in the software industry.

The Wright brothers had a dream. And they achieved the dream by continuous learning and improvement of processes. Let us dream that each one of us could write a zero defect code and achieve that through continuously evolving software engineering practises. Happy Software Engineering!