<p>Most programming houses / managers i know of can only define quality in terms of the no of bugs made / resolved in retrospect. </p>

<p>However most good programmers can innately sense quality once they start meddling with the code.(right?) </p>

<p>Has any programming houses that you know of, successfully translated this information into metrics that organizations can measure and track to ensure quality? </p>

<p>I ask since i very often hear rantings from dis-gruntled managers who just cannot put their finger on what quality really is. But some organizations like HoneyWell i hear has lots of numbers to track programmer performance, all of which translates to numbers and can be ticked off during appraisals. Hence my question to the community at large to bring out the stats they know of.</p>

<p>Suggestions about tools that can do a good job of measuring messy codes will help too. </p>

There is no standard API for reading fingerprint data as far as I'm aware since it is a fairly new field and there's no standard way of doing it. Each manufacturer will provide their own API for reading the hardware. The API could just be IO specification to the hardware and there's no library whatsoever, which makes things a bit trickier. This is down to two factors. The first is that finger print readers are used in many applications - custom hardware, embedded systems through to PC authentication and beyond. Providing software for all those different systems would not be viable from the manufacturers point of view. Secondly, each manufacturer uses a different approach to reading and processing the captured images which would make a common API problematic.