By Shawn P Quigley and Jon M Quigley Change Dynamics Change is a function of tension created by the difference between the current condition and the desired state. It can only occur when this tension contains sufficient energy to overcome external forces. These external forces could be something as simple as the current condition being […]
Muri is waste associated with pushing people, processes and equipment beyond the limits or overburdening. An organization may be enamored of working large numbers of overtime hours, but any benefit for such some at a cost, and this is an example of overburdening. I once worked at a place in which the employees averaged being […]
In preparation for our trip to Eindhoven University of Technology to lecture on Configuration Management, we provide a brief excerpt on the evolution of the horseless cariage. Traditionally new market segments open due to the need to solve a problem. Such problems may be real as in the case of the environmental crisis solved by […]
I have been dabbling once again with bowing. I did this when I was a kid with my family. I bowled on a league from time to time as well. Then you graduate, get a job, wife, and child, and you sort of just stop plying for whatever reason. As I restart my bowling endeavor, […]
It is clear to me that some people think an agile approach means you can willy-nilly delete things in the process. This is also true for conventional project, but I do not think for the same reasons. For conventional projects, it seems time pressures cause elimination of certain functions or processes to keep the schedule. […]
The Sandbox There are times, when every conversation you have with one of your colleagues or family member just brings up a myriad of potential posts for a blog. The latest discussion was around clean your own sandbox. We have written about this in the past, but from a prioritization perspective, that is, why solve […]
We see some company responses to economic downturn are to eliminate staff as if that were the only way to become a viable company once again. We wonder if these companies have some cost improvement methodology behind them that would give their management other options than summarily removal of personnel.
We have mapped how long it takes to prepare the vehicle for testing using the histogram. We have used the Ishikawa diagram to generate ideas we wish to investigate as causing the time to be longer than we would like it to be. Our next step is to see if the ideas suggested in the […]
We like the title Random Acts of Product Development. It often appears that product development is a collection of ill-conceived and poorly executed tasks. Those planning refuse to recognize dependencies between groups and tasks and are unable or unwilling to acknowledge they are really working within a system – blinded by the solely important launch […]
Extreme testing occurs when we deliberately “torture” both the hardware and software to see what happens under undesirable conditions. Some examples of extreme testing include: Random voltages within the allowable voltage boundaries Voltage slews Deliberately introduced random noise on the data bus Extremely high bus loading (over 80% and sometimes over 90%) to see […]