Quality Management

Managing quality and IT tools, is essential for purchasing and material management.

Quality management is the act of overseeing all activities and tasks needed to maintain a desired level of excellence. This includes the determination of a quality policy, creating and implementing quality planning and assurance, and quality control and quality improvement. It is also referred to as total quality management (TQM).

Quality Defined

It is defined as characteristic or attribute of a product or service. Refers to measurable characteristics that we can compare to known standards, in software it involves such measures as cyclomatic complexity, cohesion, coupling, function points, and source lines of code.

Quality Management

It serves as an umbrella activity that is applied throughout the software process, involves doing the software development correctly versus doing it over again, it reduces the amount of rework which results in lower costs and improved time to market. It encompasses

• A software quality assurance process
• Specific quality assurance and quality control tasks (including formal technical reviews and a multi-tiered testing strategy)
• Effective software engineering practices (methods and tools)
• Control of all software work products and the changes made to them
• A procedure to ensure compliance with software development standards
• Measurement and reporting mechanisms

Quality Management Methods

There are many methods for quality improvement. These cover product improvement, process improvement and people based improvement. In the following list are methods of quality management and techniques that incorporate and drive quality improvement:

• ISO 9004:2008 — guidelines for performance improvement.
• ISO 9001:2015 – a certified quality management system (QMS) for organisations who want to prove their ability to consistently provide products and services that meet the needs of their customer and other relevant stakeholders.
• ISO 15504-4: 2005 — information technology — process assessment — Part 4: Guidance on use for process improvement and process capability determination.
• QFD — quality function deployment, also known as the house of quality approach.
• Kaizen — Japanese for change for the better; the common English term is continuous improvement.
• Zero Defect Program — created by NEC Corporation of Japan, based upon statistical process control and one of the inputs for the inventors of Six Sigma.
• Six Sigma — 6σ, Six Sigma combines established methods such as statistical process control, design of experiments and failure mode and effects analysis (FMEA) in an overall framework.
• PDCA — plan, do, check, act cycle for quality control purposes. (Six Sigma’s DMAIC method (define, measure, analyze, improve, control) may be viewed as a particular implementation of this.)
• Quality circle — a group (people oriented) approach to improvement.
• Taguchi methods — statistical oriented methods including quality robustness, quality loss function, and target specifications.
• The Toyota Production System — reworked in the west into lean manufacturing.
• TQM — total quality management is a management strategy aimed at embedding awareness of quality in all organizational processes. First promoted in Japan with the Deming prize which was adopted and adapted in USA as the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award and in Europe as the European Foundation for Quality Management award (each with their own variations).
• BPR — business process reengineering, a management approach aiming at optimizing the workflows and processes within an organisation.
• Top Down & Bottom Up Approaches—Leadership approaches to change