Team Insight: What Animal Can Best Inspire Developers and QA?

Is there an animal who can inspire better software?

For fun, Swan’s team decided to choose an animal that could teach a developer or QA engineer to be better at their job. While the answers were definitely tongue in cheek, one of our team members shared his thought-provoking look at one particular creature.

The ant.

Since Biblical times, ants have been an example of wisdom and hard work ethics, as well as a warning to the lazy. But what specifically can they teach developers and QA?

Optimization

Ants are able to find the shortest path from place to place and collect food efficiently. Developers can learn how to optimize code and algorithms, ensuring that the application runs quickly and efficiently.

Parallel Processing

Ants work in large insect colonies, and each ant has a role to play. Developers can take a lesson from this and create applications that can execute tasks in parallel by dividing the work between different threads or processes.

Responsibility

Ants have a high level of responsibility for fulfilling their duties in the colony. QA can learn to be responsible for their work and tasks and perform testing with high attention and precision.

Detail

Ants pay attention to small details, and this helps them find food and make routes. QA can take a cue and thoroughly test software, paying attention to small details that can hide bugs.

These four bits of wisdom are not the only thing we can learn from ants. Ants work together as a team to accomplish goals. Ants help each other create impressive colonies. Much like our team works together to create impressive software.

So while we may learn to rest like a cat, persevere like a mule, or remember like an elephant, for developers and QA, their inspiration might just be a little bit smaller.

But still very, very, mighty.

If you’re looking for a team of developers to create a high-quality custom application for your company, contact us to schedule a free assessment.