Mike Harris' Testing and Quality Blog
It is useful to have guiding principles on how to be a good employee, teammate and tester. I work in teams that describe themselves as lean or agile and so I am interested in learning what lean and agile are. Learning about how lean and agile came about helps me understand them. John Willis has …
Continue reading “My new guiding principles are helping me to automate tests.”
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. …
The SIGiST Summer 2024 Conference was a great success. The British Computer Society hosted the conference at its London office. We had nearly 200 delegates, which is more than at previous conferences. Over twenty speakers gave interesting and inspiring talks. It was great to have speakers for whom this was their first experience of speaking …
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?”
Testing can be hard, particularly when time is short because the team has a tight schedule. While working with Rob Falla I learned to use Critical Path Analysis to help my team deliver work on time, which helped me have more time for testing. Sometimes it is hard to complete the work that a team …
Continue reading “How to help your team complete their work and so have more time for testing”
“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 …
This book is both insightful and useful. It was recommended to me by members of the Deming Profound Book Club. Wheeler describes how to create control charts and analyse processes using control charts. This book can help you start to use control charts to analyse data from your test and development processes. Walter Shewhart invented …
We all know that speaking up and getting your point over at a meeting is important. However, I am sure that we have all taken part in meetings when everyone is so keen to speak that we do not listen to one another. It is not only important to speak, it is also important to …
Continue reading “Developing your listening skills is really useful”
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 …
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 …
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 …
“The ability to work and deliver in small batches is especially important” [1], which is why many development teams work in small batches. Scrum teams work in small batches by limiting the work they plan to do in a sprint. Kanban teams work in small batches by limiting the work in progress. Working in small …
Continue reading “Why we should work in small batches – a story from Japan”
W. Edwards Demings’s System of Profound Knowledge (SoPK) is a valuable framework for leadership. SoPK provides a view, which Deming called a lens, “by which to understand the organisations we work in”[1]. The SoPK is “a framework for applying best efforts to the right tasks”[2]. There are four parts to the SoPK: The theory that …
Continue reading “First Thoughts on a System of Profound Testing”
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 …
Continue reading “Use a cause-and-effect diagram to achieve consensus when defining quality”
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