The Importance of Quality Checks

A study focused on the painstaking work of categorizing shards of Tusayan White Ware, a type of painted hand-formed pottery used in northeastern Arizona between 825 and 1300. Credit: Leszek Pawlowicz and Christian Downum/Northern Arizona University. Source: New York Times

Every day, we are both living and creating history, building on the artifacts and creations of those who came before us. As a society, we rely heavily on interconnectedness and trust, but with this dependence comes the need for quality checks and procedures to ensure that what we use and build upon is reliable and accurate.

Archaeology provides an excellent example of this need for checks and balances. Every discovered artifact belongs to a particular civilization, with unique properties and aspects that bring them together. Museums and exhibitions use this concept to assemble artifacts into galleries, providing valuable insights into the past.

In information science, every new asset created by an office professional is an artifact, whether it’s based on code or no-code development. With different languages and legacy systems, it’s important to ensure that great ideas persist and evolve without errors and misuses. Experience and practice bring new ideas to light, and evaluating artifacts and collections can lead to the creation of successful, healthy, and scalable tools.

However, checking data quality during the development process can be tedious and slow down progress. Yet, it’s a necessary practice to ensure that the outcome is reliable and accurate, similar to assuring clean water for people to enjoy. To help with this, the JavaScript library arqeo can prove artifacts or an array of them against their definition condition and raise errors if necessary.

In the development process, every feature or data flow typically follows a hypothesis set. However, checking data quality throughout the process can be challenging and time-consuming, potentially delaying the desired outcome. Nonetheless, ensuring data quality is a best practice to ensure that the final product is accurate and reliable. The arqeo JavaScript library provides a way to check artifacts or arrays against their definition conditions, raising an error in the else condition if they fail to meet the required standards. This approach can be likened to testing the purity of water before drinking it blindly. The module has a clean interface with verb methods, which uses isArtifactCallback-function as a definition statement and applyCallback-function to transform a valid artifact:

• is: validates candidate with isArtifactCallback-function to verify it is an artifact;
• are: verifies if candidate with isArtifactCallback-function to verify it is a collection;
• has: verifies if candidate has valid artifact items;
• catalog: applies isArtifactCallback on potential {artifact, collection}-elements to validate each item individually;
• apply: applies applyCallback-function on artifact-candidate with validation of isArtifactCallback-function.

In conclusion, ensuring the integrity of artifacts and creations is vital in maintaining the trust and interconnectedness of modern society. By implementing quality checks and procedures, we can build on the achievements of our predecessors and create a better future.