Mike Harris' Testing and Quality Blog
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 …
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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 …
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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 …
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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 …
Juran’s Quality Control Handbook is a reference book for people who “are involved with” quality. The 4th Edition of the handbook includes an article by Frank M. Gryna about Quality Costs. Gryna says that as companies began to extend the concept of identifying costs to quality they found that costs relating to quality were much …
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