Failure testing

Examples of Failure testing in the following topics:

• Quality Control and Assurance

  • Quality assurance is measured through failure testing and statistical control.
  • Failure testing determines the stress levels under which a product will fail by exposing it to unanticipated stresses, like intense vibration, temperature, and humidity.
  • Stress testing uncovers problems that can be fixed with simple changes to improve the product.
  • Many organizations use Six Sigma levels of quality, so the likelihood of an unexpected failure is less than four in one million.
  • Quality control (QC) is the process of testing finished products to uncover defects and reporting the results to management, which makes the decision to allow or deny product release.

• Total Quality Management (TQM)

  • Appraisal costs include costs associated with conducting quality audits and the inspection and testing of raw materials, work-in-process, and finished goods.
  • Internal failure costs include the lost productivity and waste associated with having to scrap or rework a product.
  • Finally, external failure costs occur when the defect occurs after the product has reached the customer.

• Failure of Small Businesses

• Barriers to Managing Control

  • There are sometimes barriers to testing, measuring, communicating, or observing how effectively a system or process is running.
  • All measurement tests need to be tested themselves; an understanding of best practices in taking measurements is critical in project managment.
  • Even one failure out of one hundred adds up in an organization with thousands of processes to monitor.

• Bureaucratic Control

  • Quality control both verifies the delivery of good quality and identifies gaps and failures that need to be addressed within the process.
  • The theory underlying this is the scientific method, where observations are made and hypotheses generated, which are then tested in the next cycle.

• Overview of Strategic Planning Tools

  • Scenario planning is an interesting tool with which strategists construct various scenarios to test out the potential trajectories of specific operational plans.
  • An excellent tool for strategists pursuing a particularly risky venture is to develop the primary objectives and strategy while simultaneously constructing a contingency plan that will limit the negative effects of failure.

• Leadership and Situational Context: Fiedler

  • The Least Preferred Co-worker (LPC) test asks test takers to think of someone they least prefer working with and rate that person from one to eight on a scale of various traits.
  • The LPC test is not actually about the co-worker; it is a profile of the test taker.
  • Test subjects who are more oriented to human relations generally rate their least preferred co-workers higher, and the opposite is true for task-oriented test takers.
  • The LPC test reveals how respondents react to those that with whom they do not like working, and thereby reveals leadership contexts best suited to the test takers' personality.
  • The Least Preferred Co-worker (LPC) test reveals more about the test-taker than about the co-worker or the type of work the tester and co-worker did together.

• Elements of Managing Control

  • The key elements of a control process include a characteristic to be tested, sensors, comparative standards, and implementation.
  • For example, if an organizations focuses on quality and durability, then the control factors should be testing the consistency of quality and the overall durability in the outputs of the system.
  • This is often referred to as a series of corrective actions that address and test issues with the process in the next control cycle.

• Employee Selection

  • Common selection tools include ability tests (cognitive, physical, or psychomotor), knowledge tests, personality tests, structured interviews, the systematic collection of biographical data, and work samples.
  • The predictor cutoff is a limit distinguishing between passing and failing scores on a selection test—people with scores above it are hired or further considered while those with scores below it are not.

• Speed of Innovation

  • First-movers also encounter high fiscal risks in integrating a new product or services into their distribution, and failure often means sunk costs.
  • Latecomers to the game can simply observe the success or failure of other competitors and make more informed (and less risky) decisions about entering the market segment.