Mike Harris' Testing and Quality Blog
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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I use the Five S’s to create a disciplined structure that helps me create and maintain automated tests. Mary and Tom Poppendiek recommend using the Five S’s to create the discipline necessary to develop quality software. They wrote that “the five S’s are a classic lean tool to organise a workspace” [1]. Mary and Tom …
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Cause-effect diagrams are a useful technique that can be used to improve quality. Glenford J. Myers wrote that “a weakness of boundary value analysis and equivalence partitions is that they do not explore combinations of input circumstances”[1]. A technique that can be used to explore and describe combinations of inputs to an issue is a …
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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 …
I enjoy working in an organisation where we are learning from the work we do. An example of this would be using retrospectives to enable the team to learn from their work and taking this knowledge forward to help the team. Until recently I have called this approach continuous learning. It sounded right, as it …
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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I have worked in lean or agile teams for a number of years and developing my knowledge of lean and agile has helped me. The Deming Cycle is something I have found helpful to understand because it is a part of agile and lean and it is also about continuous improvement of quality. Engineering teams …
We want to find bugs as early as possible so that the cost of fixing them is as little as possible. The earlier a bug is found the cheaper it is to fix. If a bug is found and fixed in a specification before any code is written then it costs very little to fix. …
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