Quality Assurance & Process Capability

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Abstractions about conformance, critical quality attributes, process validation and capability, statistical control, root-cause diagrams, and software quality assurance.

12 abstractions in this family — domain-specific abstractions that sit near one another in structural-signature space (k-means over structural-signature embeddings). Each is shown with its short description.

• Analytic and enumerative statistical studies — Deming’s distinction between studies estimating a defined finite population and studies learning how a continuing process will behave under future conditions.
• Conformance testing — Assessment of whether a product, process, service, or implementation satisfies stated requirements of a specification, standard, contract, or regulation.
• Critical to quality — A measurable product, service or process characteristic whose performance has a direct and substantial effect on customer-perceived or required quality.
• Ishikawa diagram — A branching cause-and-effect diagram that organizes hypothesized contributors to a specified problem under major categories for structured investigation.
• Process capability index — A family of ratios comparing a statistically stable process’s natural variation and centering with engineering specification limits.
• Process performance index — A ratio comparing the nearest specification limit to three estimated long-term standard deviations from the observed process mean, commonly denoted Ppk.
• Process validation — A lifecycle program of evidence demonstrating that a defined process can consistently produce outputs meeting predetermined requirements.
• Quality function deployment — A structured method for translating customer needs into prioritized technical characteristics and cascading them through product or service design.
• Quality storyboard — A visual sequence that records a quality-improvement problem, evidence, analysis, interventions and results in the order of a structured improvement cycle.
• Software quality assurance — Planned process-level activities that establish, monitor and audit standards, methods and evidence so software work products and engineering practices meet defined quality requirements.
• Tampering (quality control) — Adjustment of a stable process in response to ordinary common-cause variation, thereby increasing rather than reducing output variability.
• U-chart — A statistical process-control chart for nonconformities per inspection unit when the number or size of units inspected can vary between samples.