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>software testing, ISO 9000, GMP Major difference is that ISO and GMP are intended to be mandated in a way that can only result in excess mindless behavior to

>software testing, ISO 9000, GMP Major difference is that ISO and GMP are intended to be mandated in a way that can only result in excess mindless behavior to some extent, but software testing can actually be made to avoid that. >may be an essential part of achieving quality, but they don't cause it. In the case of ISO 9000 with 20/20 hindsight it's more like it can be bureaucratically essential to gain acceptance among those orgs who don't know quality enough to recognize it on their own. This was primarily an anti-competitive standard to keep less-bureaucratic products (from less-developed counties as well as the US) from outside Europe away from the continent, issued during an unfavorable currency situation before the Euro or even the EU existed. If Deming were here today we'd be talking about the way ISO 9000 brought the continuous improvement process to its knees by requiring additional bureaucracy which diverts more resources than were once being more effectively deployed in true quality improvement efforts. The result has been a freezing in place of the quality that was reached when ISO 9000 accreditation is achieved. It's a huge milestone and the effort just to maintain that level of recognition is entirely focused on no further changes being made if at all possible, due to the extreme added difficulty of pushing a change up or down through the entire organization. Not every one is frozen back to 1987, but the pervasiveness for so long has had an exorbitantly unmeasurable cost. Especially in terms of reduced innovation. Plus many US companies that were in production before ISO were making higher quality products then than they do now, it really helps to see this if you were there at the time.

projektfu 3y ago
Definitely. I never really understood why ISO 9000 was the focus. It's one thing to say, "We need operational definitions" and "Our procedures should be well specified" but totally another to have all these consultants running about bikeshedding the format of the documents and things like whether you should be able to select and copy from a PDF file. Documentation systems don't give you quality, but something is needed to maintain the documentation of the system, so that you know how you got to where you are. I have been in many places where I wished that people would apply some of the system of profound knowledge. Just getting the PDSA cycle into effect on a few teams would have been great. More and more, though, it is hard to see how we should be measuring the capability of the system. Deming's examples are generally from things that lend themselves to time series analysis, preferably with small batch samples, like manufacturing processes. It is much harder, in my opinion, to determine what to even study in a software process or a medical care process. If you focus too much on a metric, it will become the goal. An interesting book to me was Juran on Quality By Design. It complements the systems approach with a design methodology based around trying to understand a lot of the ecosystem of the product. Juran, of course, was another Western Electric guy influenced by Walter Shewart.

projektfu 3y ago

Definitely. I never really understood why ISO 9000 was the focus. It's one thing to say, "We need operational definitions" and "Our procedures should be well specified" but totally another to have all these consultants running about bikeshedding the format of the documents and things like whether you should be able to select and copy from a PDF file. Documentation systems don't give you quality, but something is needed to maintain the documentation of the system, so that you know how you got to where you are. I have been in many places where I wished that people would apply some of the system of profound knowledge. Just getting the PDSA cycle into effect on a few teams would have been great. More and more, though, it is hard to see how we should be measuring the capability of the system. Deming's examples are generally from things that lend themselves to time series analysis, preferably with small batch samples, like manufacturing processes. It is much harder, in my opinion, to determine what to even study in a software process or a medical care process. If you focus too much on a metric, it will become the goal. An interesting book to me was Juran on Quality By Design. It complements the systems approach with a design methodology based around trying to understand a lot of the ecosystem of the product. Juran, of course, was another Western Electric guy influenced by Walter Shewart.