Quality Assurance and Its History
Quality assurance is a method that focuses on procedures done for ensuring the product’s quality. It makes sure that we do tests correctly. Nevertheless, many wondered how QA starts and who started implementing quality assurance.
Beginning
Quality always plays a vital part in our lives. For example, when buying commodities, we always make sure that it is durable, comfortable, and worth buying. Recognizing quality starts in the Middle Ages. That time, we can also say that quality has begun. During those times, people have guilds that check products and services to see if they meet specific standards. This concerns the details and procedures done to produce such products and execute services.
The Guilds
Until the 19th century, the guilds still exist. As mentioned earlier, the guilds are in charge of implementing regulations and standards over the product or service. As compared to the present time, there are certain people assigned to enforce standards in production and services offered. Guild members keep specific standards of quality. But due to some instances, the guilds start to abolish. The existence of guilds begins to hinder free trade, which traders did not find favorable.
The Industrial Revolution
Quality assurance formally started in the industrial revolution era. There are craftsmen with skills who were joining guilds but kept working in factories for ensuring the production of quality products. In this era, here is an American mechanical engineer named Frederick Winslow Taylor who prescribed methods to use. Initially, the methods were designed to push productivity and efficiency in production. Eventually, other parts of the ways involve training f employees and workers. Moreover, from that, we call it the Scientific Management.
Scientific Management
Later, Walter Shewhart improved Taylor’s scientific management method in the 1930s. He introduced plan-do-the-study-act or also known as PDSA. This came out when he noticed that there is more room for improvement, particularly in Taylor’s scientific management. To put it simply, PDSA was responsible for introducing cycles for improving quality.
After World War II
After World War II, Gen. Douglas MacArthur and W. Edward Demings worked to turn Japan into an industrial force. For this reason, it leads to an increase in factory quality and efficiency.
As we can see now, turning Japan into an industrial force became successful. As a matter of fact, people around the globe are enjoying it now because of the products they produce, especially in the car industry.
More Innovations
Improving PDSA is effective. They bring innovation to life through iterative and incremental development. After that, the Agile software development process was born. In addition, this is the quality assurance we use today.
Conclusion
The quality assurance process is not only applicable to today’s world. It has started way back in the middle ages. As time passed, some innovations and improvements make quality assurance at the next level. Furthermore, this leads to discoveries and the introduction of new methods to assure the quality of products. In the present, we are now enjoying high-quality products because of Quality Assurance.