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 …

It is never too late to reassess how you define quality

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 …

A review of Dr Joseph Juran’s autobiography: “Architect of Quality”

“Architect of Quality”[1] is the autobiography of Dr Joseph Juran. Juran’s autobiography is the moving story of a Romanian immigrant to the USA who rose from poverty to being a world leader in quality and receiving honours from the Emperor of Japan and the President of the USA. Those of us who work in quality …

Testing needs to include the needs of internal and external customers

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 …

Four insights from “a reference book for all who all who are involved with quality”

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 …

A quality costs scorecard

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 …

How do you decide when to stop testing?

There is always more testing that  can be done on a feature but there are reducing returns on testing a feature over time. At some point you need to stop testing, and the question as to when to stop is sometimes a difficult call. Also, sometimes there is more than one feature to be tested. …

The Quality Trilogy helps discussions with your team

We want to create quality features, products and services. Using a framework to think through how to achieve this is helpful as the framework ensures that vital points are covered. Testers can provide value by understanding these frameworks and using them to shape their own thinking in order to be able to prompt and/or lead …

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