Quality Progress - American Society for Quality

ackground section to be incorrect. The incident at Three Mile Island was not a
meltdown; there was no breach of the containment device. Admittedly, there was a small
release of alleged radioactive materials. I believe nuclear power generation is a viable
solution to this country?s on going power needs and it pains me when I read articles
containing incorrect information.
Gary Beal
Operations Manager
Rubber Associates
garyb@rubberasc.org
16890 Re: Letter: Software Quality Will Improve When Managers Are Educated
ASQ Staff
Sep-03-03
TRUDY HOWLES' RESPONSE:
Dear Johanna:
This is in response to your comments regarding the article in the August publication: I
echo your sentiments regarding scheduling and management's role. However, not all
software problems can be traced back to these sources. Without a doubt, schedules and a
company's management are driving forces and certainly set the tone of the quality culture
within the organization. However, management (and indirectly the schedule) can not take
full blame. Educators, designers, system and development engineers, testers and team
leaders (just to mention just a few) all have the ability to recommend improvements and
identify deficiencies. Providing an organization adequate and well trained management
and a limitless budget and schedule still would not guarantee a quality product. The
product would only be as good as the work products from the weakest link in the
development cycle. Everyone in every job must continually strive to improve both their
own personal work and the work products within their organization, work to be more
productive, and become more customer oriented. Responding to the recent computer
viruses Watts Humphrey, I believe, hit the nail on the head when he said that we need to
inject more discipline into software writing and identified a " ... need to focus on the
practices of the individual engineers." (The Wall Street Journal, Aug. 26, 2003, p. B1)
Every contributor needs to examine practices and tools and strive to become better and
more efficient at what they do. I do not feel that one can identify a single source as the
root cause of all software development's woes. Certainly, there are enough problems (and
enough finger-pointing) to go around.
Trudy Howles
tmh@cs.rit.edu
16889 Letter: Software Quality Will Improve When Managers Are Educated
ASQ Staff
Sep-03-03