
Highlights on "quality," and Deming's work as it applies to software (2016) - kqr
https://apenwarr.ca/log/20161226
======
rswail
Amazing how deep insights like Deming's are shallowed out by the consultant
class.

I engaged with any number of useless "6 sigma black belt" champions that
couldn't explain what was deviation from the mean or why +/\- 3 sigma was a
good thing. Let alone how it applied to software development and defect
detection and variation.

The same applies today to all our "Agile" consultant friends who don't know
what a scrum is or why the term is applicable, the "Scrum Masters" that run
their daily "stand ups" without actually leading anything except that 15
minutes of the day, the "Product Owners" who have no idea what their "Product"
is for or what the actual users need...

What goes around comes around...

------
dredmorbius
Going to the source is excellent advice.

A newly-favourite passage from Schopenhauer:

"No greater mistake can be made than to imagine that what has been written
latest is always the more correct; that what is written later on is an
improvement on what was written previously; and that every change means
progress. Men who think and have correct judgment, and people who treat their
subject earnestly, are all exceptions only. Vermin is the rule everywhere in
the world: it is always at hand and busily engaged in trying to improve in its
own way upon the mature deliberations of the thinkers. So that if a man wishes
to improve himself in any subject he must guard against immediately seizing
the newest books written upon it, in the assumption that science is always
advancing and that the older books have been made use of in the compiling of
the new. They have, it is true, been used; but how? The writer often does not
thoroughly understand the old books; he will, at the same time, not use their
exact words, so that the result is he spoils and bungles what has been said in
a much better and clearer way by the old writers; since they wrote from their
own lively knowledge of the subject. He often leaves out the best things they
have written, their most striking elucidations of the matter, their happiest
remarks, because he does not recognise their value or feel how pregnant they
are. It is only what is stupid and shallow that appeals to him. An old and
excellent book is frequently shelved for new and bad ones; which, written for
the sake of money, wear a pretentious air and are much eulogised by the
authors’ friends."

[https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/s/schopenhauer/arthur/essays/...](https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/s/schopenhauer/arthur/essays/chapter1.html)

