Drawing Parallels ..

Talked to a very old friend. School days in rural Orissa. He used to be physically very strong and good at studies too. And what was characteristic about him, was his righteous stubborn-ness.

Over the years, he has become an IPS officer. As in Indian Police.

While talking, making few jokes on how Indian police works, how they prevent crime etc. he mentioned one thing that draws an interesting parallel to what I do being in engineering.

When I asked him, say a theft happens - how does he go about finding the culprit ?

His answer was simple. With a very clam tone he was explaining me the procedure which is outright brute force and yet seems very effective.

When a crime happens, he looks at the signature of the crime. Is it done in night or day ? Entered through back door or front door ? If a door is broken, which instrument has been used ?

Many parameters of the signature are collected. Then, all the signatures are run against a database of all the criminals in the area. A list of the criminals found from this analysis is run against the database to see if some of them are inside the jail. The rest of them are brought to police station and interrogated. 90% of the cases, they nail it down there.

We do the same in engineering. Something happens on field. Analyze the signatures. Run through existing issues database, re-run to see which fixes out of them are in. Focus on the rest, and 90% we get to the root :)