As consultants, we often are the bearer of news that no one necessarily wants to hear. Or to put it another way, we are the sobering voice of how things should be done in order to guarantee successful execution. Often, clients are in the position of wanting to short-change process for time. We have to launch this today! We need to push those changes now!
Despite the best laid plans, there are always emergencies. So, we have given a lot of thought to our Quality Assurance program. This is the secret sauce that makes working with us yield predictable results that have our clients coming back again and again for support.
From our perspective, QA is often thought of as a step in the testing process, but we believe that it is broader than this and consists of both Quality Assurance and Quality Control. Our philosophy is based on many years of experience in best practices in the software development world, as well as hundreds of hour of experience working with our clients to make them successful.
The Industrial Revolution started the modern ideology of quality assurance. In the first factories, a man named Taylor developed a system that saved time and improved output by training workers (instead of having them learn on their own) and strictly enforcing as well as documenting process methods. His concepts were then expanded on by Walter Stewhart at Bell Labs in the 1930s who developed the methodology plan-do-study-act (PDSA). It was this system that first introduced cycles for improving quality. Finally, after WWII W. Edwards Deming took these concepts even further, refining the iteration process that would be the precursor to Agile and Waterfall development methodologies.
It is important to understand that Deming realized that there was a conflict between hard work and smart work. Instead of working harder to produce more, Deming felt his methods of QA would lessen the workload and therefore save money and time by analyzing and documenting all aspects of the development process.
Today, this very same conflict exists, as noted in the introduction. So there are in fact two methods of iterative or incremental development, the waterfall method and the agile development method. Thoughtful use of each is imperative and a company must really understand the advantages and disadvantages to each use to avoid the pitfalls.
For us, the following chart depicts how we reconcile the competing interests of the methodology.
We know that we are working with people and we address the human components of the project first. For example, if a stakeholder needs a change to the website to fix a form that is broken, we respond to that change immediately. The customer experience always takes precedence over documentation. But, what we build into our process, is that we do come back and not only document the changes, but also look for the root causes. Our goal is that we continue improving and driving change without staying stuck in a fix it, rear-view mirror approach. This is why process, as Deming realized, actually does ultimately yield efficiency. The goal is to spend more time looking ahead and answering questions that arise instead of stuck in that (now made famous by Dunkin Donuts) routine…Time to make the donuts! You need time to be inventing the next thing, like gelato on a stick (that I just saw in Santa Monica last weekend) not continuing to make the donuts.