In this book, Bob Browne recounts how he drew on ideas from both the East and the West, including the philosophies of W. Edwards Deming and Eli Goldratt, to make the Great Plains Coca-Cola Bottling Company a success. In 1980, Bob Browne, with the help of a few others, acquired the Great Plains Coca-Cola Bottling …
Tag Archives: Quality
Ten reasons why you should lint your test automation code
A linter is a static analysis tool that scans source files and reports warnings and errors for the code it scans. I use a linter on the test automation code that I write. The linter tests the code I write without running the code. Here are ten reasons to use a linter on your test …
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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 …
Learning from CrowdStrike with Taguchi
The recent CrowdStrike incident is estimated to have “affected 8.5 million Windows devices” [1] and may have been “the worst cyber event in history” [1] How should we understand its impact on quality? Genichi Taguchi’s definition of quality helps us understand how the CrowdStrike incident affected quality. He wrote that “quality is the loss a …
Two ways of learning that benefit testing
Testers are learning all the time. I have been reading John Dues’ new book Win-Win: W. Edwards Deming, the System of Profound Knowledge, and the Science of Improving Schools with the Profound Deming Book Club and have gained insights into different ways of learning. “Moving from planning to doing is deductive learning and moving from …
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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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How to help your team complete their work and so have more time for testing
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 …
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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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A review of ”The Checklist Manifesto How to Get Things Right” by Atul Gawande
As testers, we often use checklists, such as a Definition of Done, so I was drawn to this book when it was suggested at the Profound Deming Bookclub. Atul Gawande tells the story of how he was asked by the World Health Organisation(WHO) to develop a global programme to reduce avoidable deaths and harm from …
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A review of “Understanding Variation The Key to Managing Chaos” by Donald J. Wheeler
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 …
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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