Dr Deming

I figured I’d make this summary for anyone unfamiliar with Dr Deming. You can Google him and visit the Deming Institute site but I wanted to cover his relevance to software development and QA especially.

How did I come across him? As I mentioned in the About section his name kept coming up when I started my research around 2018. It was mainly in books but the last source was the site which explained the term shift left using the burnt toast analogy.

On his Profound Podcast, John Willis often says it all goes back to Deming. If you listen to Dr Steven Spear, Gene Kim, Jez Humble, Dave Farley, the Poppendiecks, they’ll talk about Lean, Toyota or NUMMI. Andrew Clay Shafer is one of the people who coined the phrase DevOps; he’s directly referenced Dr Deming in this presentation

You can read about the relationship between Dr Deming and Toyota here. The Sys-Tao site has some good links, these are about Dr Deming.

  1. If Japan Can, Why Can’t We?
  2. W. Edwards Deming - Part 1

I’ve put some comments on the 14 points and system of profound knowledge as it applied to my QA team.

  1. Fourteen Points
  2. System of Profound Knowledge