Quality Assurance is perceived as an extra, as overhead and generally, a cost center. To some extent, this is true. It is an investment in the long term and quality of your product or service in where the value can come back to you in any number of ways and most are not immediate or instant. Let's take a look at applying LEAN principles to Quality Assurance and see if we can improve it just a little.
What actually is LEAN?
LEAN is a strategy for reducing cycle time through waste elimination. Cycle time is the lapsed time from the start of a process to the end of the process, for example in manufacturing Machine Cycle Time and Worker Cycle Time. In Software Quality Assurance we may be able to consider each inspection station or stop can be considered a smaller cycle of the entire testing process or cycle, for example, performance testing is one cycle. What is waste in this context? Waste refers to all activities that extend the cycle time but do not add value. The objective of Lean is to reduce the cycle time by eliminating the waste also known as non-value added activities. Any process or operation that takes time, resources or space but does not add value to the product or service is waste.
The typical examples of waste are:
* Over-Production
* Waiting
* Transportation
* Processing
* Inventories
* Motion
* Defective Products
* Unused Creativity
Let's take a look at a sample Quality Assurance process and see if any of those fit or if there are some others hidden. The development team completes and releases an application to Quality Assurance for testing. In this package release, Quality Assurance expects to find business requirements, release notes, code, and repository information. If any of these items is missing, defective or incomplete, we have waste.
But whose waste is it?
What actually is LEAN?
LEAN is a strategy for reducing cycle time through waste elimination. Cycle time is the lapsed time from the start of a process to the end of the process, for example in manufacturing Machine Cycle Time and Worker Cycle Time. In Software Quality Assurance we may be able to consider each inspection station or stop can be considered a smaller cycle of the entire testing process or cycle, for example, performance testing is one cycle. What is waste in this context? Waste refers to all activities that extend the cycle time but do not add value. The objective of Lean is to reduce the cycle time by eliminating the waste also known as non-value added activities. Any process or operation that takes time, resources or space but does not add value to the product or service is waste.
The typical examples of waste are:
* Over-Production
* Waiting
* Transportation
* Processing
* Inventories
* Motion
* Defective Products
* Unused Creativity
Let's take a look at a sample Quality Assurance process and see if any of those fit or if there are some others hidden. The development team completes and releases an application to Quality Assurance for testing. In this package release, Quality Assurance expects to find business requirements, release notes, code, and repository information. If any of these items is missing, defective or incomplete, we have waste.
But whose waste is it?
LEAN manufacturing techniques can be applied to add value to software development.
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