Is Crosby’s “Quality is Free” Still Useful in Modern QA?
It is useful to review the practices of quality professionals from earlier eras to see what we can learn and what it tells us about how we work. In this article, I will review the work of Philip B. Crosby.
Crosby was the Director of Quality at ITT, and he argued that quality is free because the costs of improving quality will be more than met by reducing the Cost of Quality. Crosby also created a program to improve quality called “Zero Defects,” which would be more than covered by the costs of poor quality. He is also known for his book Quality is Free, which explained these ideas.
The Cost of Quality
In defining The Cost of Quality, Crosby shows how much poor quality costs businesses and how programs to improve quality can save the company money and increase profits. He says that the Cost of Quality consists of several ingredients.
He was writing about manufacturing and included the following ingredients: scrap, rework, service, engineering changes, and purchase order changes in the Cost of Quality. The ingredients he lists easily relate to items that software engineers deal with today:
- Scrap is rather like unfinished work
- Rework: This is like fixing bugs
- Service: This is customer service time
- Engineering change is similar to refactoring
- Purchase order changes are like customer churn
An ingredient representing fixing incidents in production could be added to the list of ingredients of the Cost of Quality. The Cost of Quality really represents the cost of poor quality.
It is so easy to relate to the ingredients Crosby wrote about in the 1970s, which shows how powerful the concept of the Cost of Quality is. If a company can improve its quality, it can reduce the costs of the ingredients. Each ingredient also has a cost in terms of time and money. Improving quality will also save time; for example, reducing the amount of time spent on bug fixing will save development time.
Today, we would be more likely to express the Cost of Quality in time than in money, as fixing bugs takes up development time that could be spent creating new features. The Cost of Quality shows the cost of poor quality, which makes it possible to argue that “Quality is Free.”
Crosby’s Quality Improvement Program
Crosby had a 14-point quality improvement program called “Zero Defects.” It is helpful to consider how the points in the program can help an engineering team today.
Point 1: Management Commitment
Crosby says this point is “to make clear where management stands on quality.” He stresses the importance of management's commitment to quality and that this commitment should be expressed through a formal quality policy.
Managers easily express support for quality, but committing to quality is more demanding as it should include understanding the processes to improve quality. It would be more useful if this commitment were expressed in developing their understanding of quality, for example, by studying quality.
If management does not understand this, they may fail to help the company improve quality as problems occur. The level of commitment that management has will influence everyone at the company.
Crosby wrote, “Workers are like a mirror. The reflection you see is your own.” Management commitment is also crucial for success because problems will be encountered. If managers understand how to improve quality, they will be able to support their teams in improving quality.
Point 2: Quality Improvement Team
A Quality Improvement Team should be recruited “to run the quality improvement program.” Crosby says that this should be a part-time role except for the chairperson.
In manufacturing, this may have been a good way to organize for quality. However, lean and agile development teams have a flatter structure. Having a separate quality improvement team places quality outside the normal line of management, which could lead to it not having as much weight as day-to-day issues. It also takes responsibility for quality improvement away from the engineering teams. For lean and agile teams, quality improvement is more likely to succeed if it is at the heart of what the team does and should be part of its responsibilities.
Point 3: Quality Measurement
Quality measurement is needed “to provide a display of current and potential non-conformance problems in a manner that permits objective evaluation and corrective action.”
A team needs to know where it is in relation to quality, and quality measurement can help a team in that regard. If metrics are imposed on a team or used to criticize rather than support the team, they can cause discontent. It is important that the team sees metrics as supportive of their goals; if they feel that they are being judged, a team can become defensive.
Point 4: The Cost of Quality
It is helpful to evaluate the cost of quality as this will define the ingredients of the cost of quality for the teams you are working with. Every company is in a different situation and it will be useful to evaluate its cost of quality. You may find that this company has a lot of unfinished work or that it spends a lot of time fixing bugs. The costs of quality that are identified are those that the company can work to reduce.
Knowing their cost of quality will also help motivate the team, as the concept of The Cost of Quality will then become a practical way for them to improve.
Point 5: Quality Awareness
Crosby advocates meetings between management and staff and a publicity campaign as a “method of raising the personal concern felt by all personnel in the company toward the conformance of the product or service and the quality of the product or service and the quality reputation of the company.”
This method of raising quality awareness shows that quality is important to the company but separates quality from other activities. It would be more useful to discuss quality in the context of work that is in progress so that quality can be built in or to consider what can be learned about quality when something has failed.
Point 6: Corrective Action
Corrective action is “to provide a systematic method of forever resolving problems identified through previous action steps.” Crosby advocates regular meetings between managers to resolve problems that have been detected.
Software engineers are motivated professionals, and instead of managers considering unresolved problems, it would be more effective to re-interpret this point to empower engineering teams to learn from defects and take corrective action that creates solutions to the issues.
Point 7: Zero Defects Planning
Crosby says that you should examine the various activities that must be conducted in preparation for formally launching the zero-defects program. Any initiative to improve quality will need planning. According to point 7, the planning needs to explain the program's concept and consider the “cultural environment of your particular organization.”
Point 8: Supervisor Training
This is “to define the type of training that supervisors need in order to actively carry out their part of the quality improvement program.” A supervisor would have been the first line in management, supervised staff work, and reported to a manager. We may no longer have staff with the title of supervisor. Still, people with leadership roles, such as scrum masters, product owners, and test leads, will probably need training to support a quality initiative better. This point is to provide training for supervisors but not for management or team members. Quality is management's responsibility, and management needs training, too.
In a lean or agile team, all staff would benefit from training as they all contribute to quality. Training needs to be lifelong learning as we always have things to learn, and creating a culture of lifelong learning will improve the abilities and knowledge of all employees. Continuously developing skills and knowledge is an activity that all staff need to embrace, as developing themselves enables us to help our teams improve quality.
Point 9: ZD Day
A Zero Defects program starts with an “event that will let all employees realize through a personal experience that there has been a change.” The example in the book “Quality is Free” includes every employee signing a pledge “to do my job right the first time” and being given an “I’m for quality” badge. This places responsibility on the employees without giving them agency, so it will not create a positive reaction that improves quality.
Point 10: Goal Setting
Goal setting is a way to turn pledges and commitments into action by encouraging individuals to establish improvement goals for themselves and their groups. A better way to ask teams to improve quality would be to help them improve continually, as setting a goal means that once the goal has been reached, the team has succeeded and does not need to improve further.
Creating a culture of continual improvement would be a better way to achieve improvements in quality than setting goals...
Point 11: Error-Cause Removal
This is “to give the individual employee a method of communicating to management the situations that make it difficult for the employee to meet the pledge to improve.” This empowers staff to raise issues to improve quality, and Crosby states that every error that causes removal action should be praised.
In an agile or lean software development team, error-cause removal could be even more powerful. Staff should be able to take many actions to remove causes of errors without needing the manager's prior approval.
Employees experience the quality of the product during their work and will have suggestions for improving it. Error-cause removal would be powerful if staff were empowered to take action themselves to improve quality without the need to ask management.
Point 12: Recognition
Recognition of those who participate in the program, whether it be public praise or an award, is really powerful. Crosby points out that people don't just work for the money; there are other factors that we value, such as appreciation. It is possible to engage people in a program to improve quality by giving recognition for their contribution. This can help create a culture of quality.
Point 13: Quality Councils
Crosby says a Quality Council should bring together quality professionals to plan communication regularly. If several testers work in a company, bringing them together in a Community of Practice to share ideas and problems is helpful. Testers can support and learn from each other if they meet regularly.
Point 14: Do It All Over Again
Quality improvement is a continuous activity, and Crosby says that you should “do it all over again to emphasize that the quality program never ends.” Crosby talks about changing the manager who leads the plan for the second year. This may have been the correct approach in manufacturing, but in a lean or agile development team, the team should own the quality of their work and, therefore, the plan.
This step turns the program into a cycle. The program would also benefit from creating learning cycles from error cause removal and corrective action so that each time an error cause is removed, the knowledge gained is shared across the teams so it can be used in future planning to improve quality.
Takeaways
Crosby’s ideas are a case of the glass being half full. The concept of the Cost of Quality is a valuable tool to quantify the cost of poor quality. Identifying the Cost of Quality provides a way of arguing that “quality is free” and can help persuade people in a company to support quality improvement.
His 14-point program, however, is not so helpful today. Many of the points in the program need updating to work for lean and agile teams and do not give teams agency to improve quality. The most useful point is the creation of Quality Councils to bring together quality professionals. The quality improvement program would also benefit significantly from psychological safety in the company as this will enable employees to ask questions and raise issues without fear of repercussions. Management should strive to ensure employees feel safe psychologically at work. This is not one of Crosby’s 14 points.
When I led a workshop about the work of W. Edwards Deming, I found that all his ideas are still helpful today, whereas Crosby should be remembered for his argument that Quality is Free, but not his program.
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