William Sherkenbach was Corporate Director of Total Quality Planning and Statistical Methods at Ford Motors and Group Director Process Improvement at General Motors. He wrote that “both of these great companies are better because their journey included Dr. W. Edwards Deming”[1]. In this book, Sherkenbach explains “how to operationalize the Deming philosophy in business, government …
Category Archives: Dr W. Edwards Deming
Collaborative customer-focused systems thinking – a review of Sys-Tao: Western Logic – Eastern Flow by Bob Browne
In this book, Bob Browne recounts how he drew on ideas from both the East and the West, including the philosophies of W. Edwards Deming and Eli Goldratt, to make the Great Plains Coca-Cola Bottling Company a success. In 1980, Bob Browne, with the help of a few others, acquired the Great Plains Coca-Cola Bottling …
Dear Software Testing
This weekend, I saw a play that showed a manager driving out fear to lead his team to success. The play was ‘Dear England’ and dramatised Gareth Southgate’s term as manager of the England men’s soccer team. The play shows Southgate using psychology. He hired the psychologist Dr Pippa Grange to be Head of People …
We need cooperation between testers and developers
Sometimes there can be competition between testers and developers. Cooperation between testers and developers is better for the company and the customer. “A system must have an aim”[1]. A company is a system and so has an aim. Testers and developers are components of the company’s system and so share the company’s aim. “The obligations …
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Do outages have to be the new normal?
Yesterday I was using a testing tool and it had an outage. Today I was automating a test when a third party had an outage and delayed my test automation. Even the third party’s Status page was not functioning. Social media was full of people complaining about the outage. Outages impacted two consecutive days of …
“The Purpose of Analysis is Insight”
Testers want to analyse the product and process to improve quality. Once every engineering team had a statistician, that is not the case today. Testers can help their team by using statistics, such as control charts, to do analysis. There are a lot of resources to help us use statistics, for example, this blog post …
Whoever you are, whatever you have achieved you should recognise the achievements of others
Dr Joseph Juran rose from poverty to be an internationally respected management consultant who specialised in quality. His work included popularising the use of the Pareto Principle and creating The Juran Trilogy. Juran focussed on the role of management in quality. He wrote and contributed to many books including six volumes of Juran’s Quality Handbook. …
Cooperation helps to improve testing, helps testers and helps the company
Testers can help increase cooperation across the company, and cooperation will help us and the company. Testers give feedback to developers when we test. We should also get feedback from other departments and customers on our work and the product we are testing. The feedback we get from cooperating with other departments brings the perspectives …
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It is better if we build quality into the product instead of trying to test quality in
“Cease dependence on inspection to achieve quality. Eliminate the need for inspection on a mass basis by building quality into the product in the first place.” [1] is one of W. Edwards Deming’s 14 Points for Management. Inspection can be defined as testing after development has been completed. Some people have interpreted Deming’s point as …
Get insights from “The World of W. Edwards Deming” by Cecelia S. Kilian
Cecelia S. Kilian was W. Edwards Deming‘s long-term secretary. She created this book which contains her memories, and many curated documents from Deming. I read this book with the Profound Deming Book Club and it made me think about why I am interested in Deming. The details of Deming’s life are interesting, however I am …
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Drive out fear to improve psychological safety
We need psychologically safe workplaces. Testers, and all other members of development teams, need to feel safe enough to be able to ask questions and express opinions about the project we are working on. The need for psychological safety is not a new issue. W. Edwards Deming saw it as an important issue. Drive out …
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A theory of management for improvement of quality vs a quality improvement plan, which helps us more?
What can we learn from comparing Deming’s 14 Points for Management and Crosby’s 14-Point Quality Improvement Plan? Which will help us more to improve quality? W. Edwards Deming first presented his 14 Points at a conference in 1978 in Tokyo[1] and published his 14 Points for Management in 1982[2]. Philip B. Crosby published his 14-point …
A review of “Deming’s Journey to Profound Knowledge” by John “Botchagalupe” Willis with Derek Lewis
W. Edwards Deming is often referred to as the “grandfather of quality”, and this new well-researched book about him and his philosophy gives us many new and useful insights. The book’s author, John Willis, is one of the people who created DevOps, and he says that to understand the roots of DevOps you need to …
Automated tests do not have to be flaky.
When I create or maintain an automated test I use a “learning loop” so that I learn from the test results. This enables me to create stable test packs that return accurate results. I automate tests with Playwright using TypeScript and with the low code tool Ghost Inspector. The “learning loop” is the same for …
The Seedbed of a Quality Revolution
A tester’s role is not only to do the testing but also to improve quality. I visited the site of the former Hawthorne Works during a recent trip to Chicago because so many innovations in quality started there. The Hawthorne Works was the Bell Telephone Laboratories site that manufactured the hardware for the first national …
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