William Sherkenbach was Corporate Director of Total Quality Planning and Statistical Methods at Ford Motors and Group Director Process Improvement at General Motors. He wrote that “both of these great companies are better because their journey included Dr. W. Edwards Deming”[1]. In this book, Sherkenbach explains “how to operationalize the Deming philosophy in business, government …
Tag Archives: Quality
Interpreting ‘quality’ in more than one way helps me uncover issues
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 …
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Why does testing take so long?
Sometimes testers are asked ‘why does testing take so long?’ The question should not make testers feel defensive. We should always be looking to improve our test process. Testers can use a technique from Toyota to answer the question and improve our process. Testers want their testing to flow easily from one task to the …
Do outages have to be the new normal?
Yesterday I was using a testing tool and it had an outage. Today I was automating a test when a third party had an outage and delayed my test automation. Even the third party’s Status page was not functioning. Social media was full of people complaining about the outage. Outages impacted two consecutive days of …
“The Purpose of Analysis is Insight”
Testers want to analyse the product and process to improve quality. Once every engineering team had a statistician, that is not the case today. Testers can help their team by using statistics, such as control charts, to do analysis. There are a lot of resources to help us use statistics, for example, this blog post …
“Go see, ask why, show respect”
Test analysts, test engineers, test leads and test managers need to understand customers so that our testing includes using the product as the customer uses it. To do this we need to learn how customers use the product by meeting the customer and seeing how they use it. Mr Fuji Cho, the former President of …
Whoever you are, whatever you have achieved you should recognise the achievements of others
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. …
Who is responsible for quality? Is it the tester, or the team?
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 …
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Gain insights by using control charts to analyse your performance test results
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 …
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It is better if we build quality into the product instead of trying to test quality in
“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 …
Get insights from “The World of W. Edwards Deming” by Cecelia S. Kilian
Cecelia S. Kilian was W. Edwards Deming‘s long-term secretary. She created this book which contains her memories, and many curated documents from Deming. I read this book with the Profound Deming Book Club and it made me think about why I am interested in Deming. The details of Deming’s life are interesting, however I am …
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Testing qualities not quality
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 …
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