Quality management (ISO 9001) and PDCA

In short: Quality management ensures that products and processes consistently achieve the desired quality. The ISO 9001 standard describes requirements for a quality management system.

In more detail: Central is the continuous improvement process following the PDCA cycle: Plan, Do, Check, Act. The cycle repeats, each round improving the process.

In Depth

• Customer orientation: know and meet requirements.
• Process orientation: describe, measure and improve workflows.
• Key figures: error rate, lead time, customer satisfaction.
• Tools: Ishikawa diagram (collect causes), Pareto principle (80 % of errors come from 20 % of causes), checklists, audits.
• Quality assurance in software: reviews, unit tests, test pyramid and end-to-end tests, code review.
• Cost of errors: The later an error is found, the more expensive.

See also: Quality assurance and tests, Agile methods: Scrum and Kanban