Quality Management Flashcards
Enhance your quality management skills by exploring key concepts, adaptive approaches, and cost-quality trade-offs. Learn to plan, manage, and control project quality using benchmarking, design experiments, trend analysis, and statistical sampling techniques.
Define:
Activity Network Diagram
These diagrams, such as the project network diagram, show the flow of the project work.
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Affinity Diagram
This diagram breaks down ideas, solutions, causes, and project components and groups them together with other similar ideas and components.
When stakeholders create a large number of ideas, you can use an affinity diagram to cluster similar ideas together for further analysis.
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Appraisal Costs
These are monies spent to test, evaluate, measure, and audit the product, deliverables, or services of the project.
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Brain Writing
A data-gathering technique that’s similar to brainstorming, but provides brainstorming meeting participants with the questions and topics for brainstorming before the stakeholder identification meeting.
In this approach the topic is introduced and then each person writes down his or her ideas and thoughts. After a time period, the ideas are openly shared with the other participants.
Define:
Brain-Netting
A brainstorming approach that utilizes web tools to enable virtual teams to brainstorming and collaborate on ideas.
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Built-In Quality
By planning quality in the design of the product specifications, quality is more likely to be achieved in the execution.
The product owner and team should work together to gain a full understanding of the value the customer expects from the project.
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Cause-and-Effect Diagrams
Diagrams that show the relationship between variables within a process and how those relationships may contribute to inadequate quality.
Also known as Ishikawa Diagrams or Fishbone Diagrams. The diagrams can help organize both the process and the team opinions, as well as generate discussion on finding a solution to ensure quality.
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Check Sheet
This is a quality tool used to tally up problems, effects, conditions, or other aspects about a project’s product during an inspection.
The results of check sheets help project managers quickly ascertain problems within the project.
Define:
Checklist
A simple approach to ensure that work is completed according to the quality policy.
For example, an electrician may have a checklist of tasks to complete when installing a new electrical fixture.
The checklist of steps for the activity ensures safety and consistency, as well as providing some evidence that all steps have been followed by the team members doing the work.
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Coding Standards
An agreed-upon approach to how the code will be built, the naming system for the coding, and other standards for the code. This is always used in an XP project.
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Common Cause
An issue solved through trend analysis because the issue is systematic.
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Control Chart
A quality control chart that maps the performance of project work over time.
Control charts are typically used in projects or operations that include repetitive activities such as product manufacturing, a series of tests, or help desk issues.
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Control Quality
An inspection-driven process that measures work results to confirm that the project is meeting the relevant quality standards.
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Cost of Conformance
This is the cost associated with the monies spent to attain the expected level of quality.
It is also known as the cost of quality.
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Cost of Conformance to Quality
The cost associated with the monies spent to attain the expected level of quality.
It is also known as the cost of quality.
Define:
Design for X
(DfX)
This is a philosophy in product design, where the “X” can mean excellence, or, more often, a specific characteristic of a solution.
The X is usually a variable that the project is trying to address, such as cost, uptime, return on investment, or another facet the organization is pursuing.
Design for X considers all components of the design and how the component affects the X variable for better or for worse.
Define:
Design-of-Experiments
This approach relies on statistical what-if scenarios to determine what variables within a project will result in the best outcome.
This type of approach is most often used on the product of the project rather than on the project itself.
The goal of the design of experiments is to isolate the root cause of an effect and to adjust that cause to eliminate the unacceptable results.
Define:
Establish Quality in the Organizational Culture
Quality in the organizational culture makes quality a priority and a way of doing business for all members of the organization.
When an organization first embraces an adaptive approach, some customers may find it difficult to “follow the rules” of Agile.
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External QA
Assurance provided to the external customers of the project.
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Failure Costs
The costs incurred due to defects, errors, or nonconformance to requirements.
They are part of the Cost of Quality (CoQ) and are categorized into Internal and External Failure Costs.
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Find the Defects through Quality Control
This quality management approach uses quality control (QC) to inspect the deliverables to keep mistakes out of the customer’s hands.
This approach still has internal costs (called internal failure costs), because you must correct the defects and redo work. Agile projects utilize testing to catch defects before they escape to the project customers.
Define:
Flowchart
A diagram illustrating how components within a system are related. Also called process maps, these can show branching, loopbacks, or multiple paths through the system.
Flowcharts show the relation between components, as well as help the project team determine where quality issues may be present and, once done, plan accordingly.
System or process flowcharts show the relationship between components and how the overall process works. These are useful for identifying risks between system components.
Define:
Histogram
A bar chart that can represent categories of defects, ranking of quality problems, and any other data you want to display regarding managing quality.
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Internal QA
The processes, activities, and practices carried out within the project or organization to ensure that the project meets its quality standards and requirements.
It focuses on identifying and addressing issues before the product or service is delivered to the customer.
