The Quality Factory’s DiagZ^TM Risk Manager helps products get to market faster and cheaper.

Read the rest of this entry »

OK - you have to admit it. We all do it.

I’ll bet you just did it too!

Read the rest of this entry »

You have a product and you have even taken the time to knock out an amazing set of requirements. Now what?

You need to make sure that the product meets those requirements. In the hardware world, this means figuring out whether every part you build is within tolerance. To do this, you have to account for part variation, operator variation, and test equipment variation.

How do you do this?

Read the rest of this entry »

The Quality Factory newsletter gives tips, tricks and insights into creating great products through design verification and quality assurance.

Read the rest of this entry »

When evaluating quality, you want to find out if you are correctly testing to requirements.

But how do you know that your design verification and testing is giving you adequate test coverage for your requirements?

Read the rest of this entry »

Apple is famous for placing aesthetics over usability.

After all, iPods and iPhones are elegant, slim works of art–but they have usability failings not shared by their competitors’ uglier devices…

… so, The Onion News Network is spot on with their parody of a new Apple laptop. This beautiful laptop dispenses with the keyboard, in favor of an iPod-like wheel. It may take 27 separate steps to get to the Menu, but hey - its gorgeous!

Six Sigma has been at the cornerstone of quality assurance theory for the past couple of decades, and nowhere has it been more firmly established than at G.E. 30 Rock, NBC’s hit comedy starring Tina Fey and Alec Baldwin, routinely takes pokes at NBC’s parent, G.E.

So it was inevitable that one day, Six Sigma would become the target. In this 30 Rock episode, Tina Fey follows Alec Baldwin to a G.E. retreat where Six Sigma is mercilessly parodied–characterized as cultish, creepy, and insular. Imagine that!

So, what happens when there is a failure due to poor quality control management?

Anyone who answers “Not much” needs to remember that even the failure of an ordinary product such as a drywall screw could result in serious injury, death, and lawsuits.

Read the rest of this entry »

What are quality control requirements exactly? Imagine this scenario:

Your son or daughter–your “little angel”–accesses a forbidden shelf. An antique vase crashes to the ground. The little boy or girl faces the parent who thunders: “Didn’t I tell you to stay off of that shelf?”

(At which point the child usually answers, “I don’t know.”)

What happens next…?

Read the rest of this entry »

Without requirements, there is no such thing as quality. Requirements do not simply appear from thin air: they must be defined and spelled out.

Let us look at techniques for writing test requirements…

Read the rest of this entry »