I once had a music teacher who in rage and frustration would shout "do what I MEAN, not what I SAY." And while the saying was a joke, it has proved to be a truism that many people rely on.

Humans, can guess at the meaning of a statement and make sense out of what is not clear or explicitly stated. However, what must be remembered is that computers cannot. Therefore, one must speak to them as one would to a teenager – explicitly stating every last detail, leaving nothing to be assumed.

To illustrate the problems with "do what I mean, not what I say" in terms of Quotas, let's use the simple example of setting up an enforced gender split on a survey. You need 50 males, and 50 Females. Everyone knows how to start the process and does so correctly, and the quotas themselves are set up with proper logic – If question "what is your gender" "male" "is selected" then increment the quota. The total is set to fifty, and then the action is selected. This is the most common problem in Quota set- up

"If male is selected 50 times, then deactivate the survey"

The goal is to have 50 male responses, and 50 female responses, so it makes sense that once the male quota has been met we would like to deactivate the survey for all male respondents. However, this isn't what has been stated. The above statement says that once 50 male responses have been collected the survey should be turned off for everyone. It doesn't matter if you have 10 female responses, the link itself has been deactivated, and no one can access the survey.

So the next step is to handle the quota termination in survey flow. You enter the flow, put two branches after the demographic block, one for males, and one for females and in the branches you have end of survey elements. Here is the second most common mistake in quota logic:

"If quota male has been met" – End of Survey
"If quota female has been met" – End of Survey

You would think that the computer should be able to guess at what you mean at this point. The person has already selected that they are a male or a female and should only be evaluated on the branch which pertains to them. Well… you are wrong. The respondent will be evaluated at each block, and if the logic only refers to the quota, then once one quota is met, everyone will be terminated.

Thus the correct logic for this scenario is to have a male and a female block in the survey flow, with the logic applied:

"If question 'what is your gender' 'male' is selected AND quota 'male' has been met"
"If question 'what is your gender' 'female' is selected AND quota 'female' has been met"

The conjunct statement first evaluates their gender and directs them to one branch, which then evaluates if the corresponding quota has been met. This will allow the gender whose quota is not met to continue with the survey, while the other gender has been met.