Mike Harris' Testing and Quality Blog
Each project has different requirements, and each set of requirements makes its own demands on ‘quality’. On every project I work on, I find it useful to interpret ‘quality’ in more than one way. Interpreting quality is more helpful than defining it. A definition is definitive whereas you can have many interpretations. It is useful …
Continue reading “Interpreting ‘quality’ in more than one way helps me uncover issues”
The recent CrowdStrike incident is estimated to have “affected 8.5 million Windows devices” [1] and may have been “the worst cyber event in history” [1] How should we understand its impact on quality? Genichi Taguchi’s definition of quality helps us understand how the CrowdStrike incident affected quality. He wrote that “quality is the loss a …
I have been reading John A. Dues’ new book Win-Win W. Edwards Deming, the System of Profound Knowledge, and the Science of Improving Schools with the Deming Profound Book Club. John Dues uses an equation to describe who is responsible for student performance[1]. This equation works as a useful analogy to describe who is responsible …
Continue reading “Who is responsible for quality? Is it the tester, or the team?”
On Friday 16 May 1924 Walter Shewhart gave his manager at Bell Telephone Laboratories a memo. The memo “suggested a way of using statistics to improve quality in telephones.[1]” Shewhart’s memo proposed using Statistical Process Control, including Control Charts for visualisation, to improve quality. Shewhart sparked “a revolution in quality control”[2] that can help us …
Continue reading “Gain insights by using control charts to analyse your performance test results”
To help me test I used to find it useful to think about what quality is for the application that I am testing. “There has been a tendency to conceive of quality as indicating the goodness of an object.”[1] There are many aspects to quality and I have found that this idea of quality is …
It can be useful to define aspects of a product that describe the quality of the application that you are testing. I have found examples of doing this in seven different decades. Sometimes these aspects have been put into sets, lists or groups and have sometimes been called quality characteristics, sometimes quality factors and at …
Continue reading “Test using Quality Characteristics\Factors\Attributes that you create.”
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 …
Kaoru Ishikawa was a significant figure in the development of quality in Japan. In his book Total Quality Control – The Japanese Way he describes many of the ways that Japanese businesses achieve quality. His book contains many points that are useful to testing professionals. He wrote that the very essence of Total Quality Control …
Continue reading “A review of “Total Quality Control – the Japanese Way” by Kaoru Ishikawa”
When I gave the talks on “What is quality” I found it was not possible to provide a definition of quality on which everyone would agree. I recently read a book by Kaoru Ishikawa which included him describing quality using a cause-and-effect diagram[1]. It occurred to me that using a cause-and-effect diagram to describe something …
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We all need to be able to reevaluate issues and concepts. We have also all heard it said that adapting to change is harder for older people. Dr Joseph Juran is one of the significant figures in quality and he changed how he defined quality when he was over 95 years old. In the third …
Continue reading “It is never too late to reassess how you define quality”
How a company responds to a complaint about quality needs careful consideration. A model that we can use to explore this issue is Dr Deming’s Red Beads Experiment. We can extend the Red Beads Experiment to include a complaint from customers. I explored the Red Beads Experiment in a previous blog post The blog post …
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The Five Whys is a technique for finding the root cause of a problem. Toyota developed this technique and it is now widely used, including in software development. I was introduced to the Five Whys by Tom Gilb as part of a course he ran on Lean QA and have used the Five Whys in …
When we test we think about the users of the functionality and we include their needs in our testing. Creating categories of customers, such as internal and external, can help us understand our customers’ uses of the functionality. Dr Joseph Juran advocated viewing customers as either internal or external customers. Juran was born in Romania …
Continue reading “Testing needs to include the needs of internal and external customers”
We can all learn a great deal from people who have influenced our industry. BCS SIGiST recently hosted a discussion with Mary and Tom Poppendieck about “How have approaches to quality changed over the past 20 years?”. Mary Poppendieck wrote books with her husband Tom about Lean Software Development based on her experience of applying …
Continue reading “How have approaches to quality changed over the past 20 years?”
Joseph Juran wrote in the 5th Edition that Juran’s Quality Handbook ”is a reference book for all who are involved with quality of products, services, and processes”. I find it a useful book to refer to if I am thinking about a problem. There are eight editions of the Juran’s Quality Control Handbook. They are …
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