Mike Harris' Testing and Quality Blog
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 …
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I really enjoyed talking with John Willis on his Profound podcast. We talked about testing and the role Deming’s philosophy plays in helping me to test. I learned from the conversation. Thank you, John Willis. Please click on this link to listen to the podcast: https://www.buzzsprout.com/1758599/12422563
To illustrate how the use of theory leads to learning W. Edwards Deming told the story of Chanticleer the cockerel[1]. Chanticleer crowed every morning, and after he crowed he saw that the sun rose. This led him to develop the theory that the sun rose because he crowed, however, one day he forgot to crow …
Continue reading “The Theory of Knowledge helps us learn from our work”
“The Art of Software Testing” by Glenford J. Myers is a classic book about software testing and I often use it as a reference. In the book, Glenford J. Myers wrote that “test cases that explore boundary conditions have a higher payoff than cases that do not”[1]. Boundary Value Analysis is a widely used testing …
Continue reading “A thought regarding boundary value analysis”
Many teams, create a definition of done to clarify what putting a card in the Done column on a scrum or kanban board means. A good number of teams also have team agreements or ‘ways of working’ which define ways in which the teams work. Also, some teams have checklists of items that need to …
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 …
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“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 …
Continue reading “A review of Dr Joseph Juran’s autobiography: “Architect of Quality””
If we want to make good quality software we need to remove barriers to good work. Dr Deming‘s 14 Points for management were the basis for lessons for top management in Japan. Dr Deming said that “the 14 Points apply anywhere, to small organisations as well as to large organisations[1]”. Point 12 is to “remove …
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 …
Continue reading “Using Ishikawa diagrams to improve quality”
How a company responds to a complaint about quality needs careful consideration. A model that we can use to explore this issue is Dr Deming’s Red Beads Experiment. We can extend the Red Beads Experiment to include a complaint from customers. I explored the Red Beads Experiment in a previous blog post The blog post …
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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 …
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 …
Continue reading “Testing needs to include the needs of internal and external customers”
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 …
Continue reading “How have approaches to quality changed over the past 20 years?”
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