The Next Leap in Productivity: What Top Managers Really Need to Know about Information Technology

4.19. Role of Top Management

The CEO and other top managers should look at ADP in the same way that they now look at Deming and TQM methods. ADP is as important for software as these methods are for manufacturing.

There are several barriers that need to be overcome in order to apply TQM techniques in the software industry. The first is that IT organizations are typically structured incorrectly, with QA separate from development—typically as a process that starts only after development completes.

This does not follow what Deming recommends and other manufacturing industries practice: you never separate the responsibility for production (development) from the responsibility of verifying what is produced (QA).

As long as you stick to the traditional IT structure, with QA starting where development ends, you will continue to suffer from the same problems that automobile manufacturing had in the 1970s—when they produced cars and had QA departments at the end of production lines, trying to fix defects as cars came off the ramp.

Automakers learned that to improve quality, they needed to put testing equipment on the production line so that production would overlap with verification of the items being produced. IT must learn the same lesson.

That is to say, your processes must overlap verification of code with creation of code. Within IT, this verification is accomplished through a regression test suite. This test suite serves the same purpose as the production line testing equipment that ...