Quality and Innovation

This is the third installment of my collaboration with John Hunter and friends on the Year-End Management Improvement Carnival, where we review the best management improvement blogs and share which posts we found to be the most insightful or helpful.

PART 3 of 4 – Clarke Ching’s stream-of-consciousness blog covers random musings, cartoons, links to useful articles, recipes, mathematical puzzles and games, and thoughts about quality-related techniques including Theory of Constraints and software development.

Testers – the worst thing that happened to software development? (5/30/2008) – This story describes a first-person view of how software quality can be achieved more easily – by studying the successful approaches used by good maintenance teams. “There’s a huge amount that development managers (i.e. those that work on bigger projects) could learn from the way good maintenance teams work. The first would be to break down their work into smaller chunks.” (Again, this reminds me of “stackless thinking”which really appeals to me.)

Critical Chain Scheduling (8/22/2008)– Clarke wrote an article, published over at stickyminds.com, covering how to use the critical chain method to improve scheduling in agile development environments. “Critical Chain, as I’ve described, is a great way of rebuilding trust between managers and their staff. In fact, it is THE best way I’ve found. It’s also sorely needed, judging by some of the comments.”

Lord Kelvin (9/13/2008) – Why measure things? On a trip to Scotland, Clarke reflected on this question as he pondered the intro to Douglas Hubbard’s book, How to Measure Anything: “When you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind; it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarcely in your thoughts advanced to the state of science.”

Go to Part 4 of 4 –>