When we write about input, we are discussing the nature of the exchange to the depending group. The Systems Engineers, in our previous example, need some input from the Marketing staff to be able to design something to achieve the marketing personnel objective and subsequently meet the customer’s need.  What is that input? For example, […]

The next few blogs will be further elaborating on the systems concept of SIPOC.  Upon completion of the characters or phases in the systems thinking and chain of events (SIPOC itself), we will illustrate how we can use these to improve our organization’s capability. This post will treat “suppliers”. We are not referring to drug […]

        Stochastic testing occurs when we allow a reasonably well-seasoned test engineer to go with their “gut” and feel their way about the product’s performance. During the development of numerous embedded automotive products, we have seen stochastic testing elicit roughly the same amount of test failures as combinatorial testing. We are not recommending that stochastic testing […]

We have briefly discussed why verification is important to the product quality. Verification does not just address the product quality. Our project work requires verification as well. When we take on a project, we should have the scope articulated in a way that we can confirm that the project did indeed fulfill the objective.  As […]

Requirements management and configuration management are required for anything that even closely resembles effective testing.  Experience suggests failing in these two areas unnecessarily complicates the product verification activities, and we will show some of those traumas in the next few posts.  An iterative and incremental product development process calls for reviews throughout the development process.  […]

We have witnessed a disconcerting trend.  That trend is in consolidating risk reserves for projects into one, centrally managed bucket of money.  This bucket was once reserved for the unknown-unknowns and was called a Management Reserve.   However, more businesses are beginning to strip projects of their known-unknown Project Risk Reserves and placing calculated project contributions […]

By: Rick Edwards A good carpenter never blames his tools. There is also an aphorism “it is the poor musician who blames his instrument”.  Why do so many good project managers blame their scheduling tool when their project schedule doesn’t fit their desired schedule? Project managers often struggle with documenting task dependencies utilizing the technology […]

We have recently had a discussion on what it takes to quality assure software. The discussion focused on FMEA and the role it plays in quality assurance.  The discussion began to sound as if the FMEA was the panacea for poor quality. There is no silver bullet. To be sure the FMEA (which is essentially […]

We have our requirements, our iterative packages and content defined, and now the developers are producing the iterations. During this time, the verification and test folks have been creating the test cases or details on how we intend to confirm the product performance. Our requirements provide the fodder for our testing.  For each requirement there […]

Once we have our captured our requirements. We identify the substance of the content for the iterations from the development.  In fact, recall from the requirements prioritization blog post. That work has given us some insight into how the iterative packages could be developed and what content or capabilities are to be delivered.  In the […]