Wednesday, April 15, 2015

Foolproof or Poka-Yoke in software development

I learned this concept when I studied Quality Control in college.

This is considered part of the TQM (Total Quality Management) practices.  Each employee should contribute to design a foolproof system which can ensure that there is no mistake can happen.

The idea is that we do not rely on the individuals to be careful when they do not need to be careful.  The system should prevent or reduce the likelihood of the error from happening.

A foolproof system  takes out the human errors from the equation.

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I think that the concept can be applied to software development as well.


If the codes can be generated, why doing coding manually?
If we can do unit testing to detect the issue earlier, when we rely on QA testing.
If choices are not necessary, why not limit the choices and thus the potential mistake of picking a wrong option.

I believe that using these techniques can improve the quality and productivity of the software development:


  • Knowledge Sharing
  • Training
  • Coding standards
  • Standard Operating Procedure (SOP)
  • Auditing
  • Automated Testing
  • Code Generation











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