While the agile methodologies encourage the team to deliver things fast, the concept of “feedback loops” (at least in my individual experience)by far remains non-agile in the following ways:

1. Means and ways to collect feedback is not strategic

2. Feedback consolidation, often times, is non agile

3. Factoring the essence of feedback is not as fast as a direct change that a business analyst asks for

4. We don’t know if we are responding to the right feedback (a classic example is varied thoughts on usability)

But again, I have faith in the postulate that “design of experiments” will supposedly address a major part of the concerns.

Some marketing intended to hint at my tool – Pairwise Test Case Generator at http://www.TestersDesk.com targets “quality and faster” problem in its own way. It creates a very small number of test cases for software testers, covering all the pairs of values of all the test parameters.

Besides, there are a lot of other tools provided by the free online toolkit at http://www.TestersDesk.com in the areas of Software Test Design and Test Data Generation (which are not yet agile, IMHO).

Thanks,
Ashwin.

———–
Ashwin Palaparthi
Founder
http://www.TestersDesk.com

Thank you for a truly amazing and affirming response. You are right: drop the middle word and you get “Quality Faster”. So interesting how the software world (especially in larger organizations IMHO) continue to cling to the notion that these two words are oxymorons. The work your father did with Deming was brilliant, evidenced by the fact that it still resonates so deeply today. In fact, I think it is having more and more impact. I see this in the software Kanban movement.

Thank you for sharing the links and the guidance. I am so grateful.

Best regards,
Jean

I completely agree with your post and am glad to see this kind of thinking increasingly start to penetrate software development discussions (particularly among Agile and/or Lean advocates).

As you imply, the concept of “Quality and Faster” has been well established for decades in manufacturing (though not always widely adopted) thanks to the efforts of Deming and others. My father, William G. Hunter (who incidentally wrote a chapter in Deming’s book “Out of the Crisis”) co-founded the Center for Quality and Productivity Improvement in the mid 1980’s. See http://cqpi.engr.wisc.edu/ The idea of “Quality and Faster” has been fundamental to the Center’s mission since then.

Increasingly, development teams are realizing they can succeed at “Quality and Faster” by adopting efficient and effective tools and methods (including Agile methods and Rally tools). Lesser known is that they can also make their “Quality and Faster” efforts even more successful by intelligently designing experiments (using applied statistics-based principles taught by people like Deming and my dad), seeing what works well, and making data-driven decisions. A great 22 minute presentation on this topic can be found at: http://testingjeff.wordpress.com/2009/06/24/controlled-experiments-to-test-for-bugs-in-our-mental-models/

Lastly,combining both of these points above (e.g., (i) proven tools and methods, and (2) Design of Experiments methods in particular), we can drop the middle word in the phrase for a moment and achieve “Quality Faster.” Through better test case identification in software testing Quality Assurance, test design tools like Hexawise can identify test conditions to be executed in test cases through the use of Design of Experiments methods that have been refined over 30+ years. Doing so, generates a smaller set of tests that will achieve higher coverage (and higher quality/thoroughness) during testing. That’s what the Hexawise test design tool does.

- Justin