This presentation shares quality management experiences and resulting insights from a career of over 31 years in product development, manufacturing, management, and process improvement. We share a selection of stories from the first year to the present, such as
- applying what we were taught
- our first great team
- producing near-zero-defect products
- the ups and downs of tools and automation
- design for the long term
- simpler, smaller, better
- losing things
- the well-engineered, low-defect products that no one wanted
- filtering out the defects
- making reviews effective
- preventing defects
We summarize these experiences and insights with our view of the required framework for achieving the highest product quality. Our experiences demonstrate that the best quality and performance are the result of the effective application across the organization of a collection of key principles and practices that are very broad in scope.
The stories and framework touch on a wide range of quality-related areas and practices, including leadership, teamwork, product management, customer needs and requirements, architecture and design, implementation, testing, configuration management, measurement, reviews, quality control and improvement, culture transformation, and customer support. We also relate our experiences, insights, and framework to guidance we have used over the years from our software engineering education, Total Quality Management, the Capability Maturity Model Integration, the Personal Software Process and Team Software Process, and Agile practices.
