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Quality During Design Podcast Blog

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About Using Slide Decks for Technical Design Reviews

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A danger of using slide decks for technical design reviews is loss of important technical information. In order to summarize something in a slide or slide deck, the presenter thins-out information without its raw data and divorces it from the plots, graphs, and other technical analyses. Slide decks are useful to the presenter to pull…

Remaking Risk-Based Decisions: Allowing Ourselves to Change our Minds.

We can use FMEA to help us make risk-based decisions about our product within changing and evolving use environments and scenarios.

Need to innovate? Stop brainstorming and try a systematic approach.

When we’re trying to innovate, we can get trapped into the old thinking that the solution has to be out there somewhere. We need to think outside the box to find the solution to a problem. We should stop brainstorming and, instead, think inside the box with Systematic Inventive Thinking. We use systematic approaches to…

HALT! Watch out for that weakest link.

Headphones illustrations by Storyset

HALT (Highly Accelerated Life Test) uses the weakest link mentality. We apply stresses beyond what our designs would normally see in the environment to make something fail. It’s meant to be an iterative test program where you are testing, analyzing the results, determining the root cause, fixing the design, and then testing it, again.

This blog reveals more about its roots, why you should perform HALT (or not), when in the design process it’s best (hint: really early), and who likely needs to be involved. Also understand how HALT is different from ALT.

The Designer’s Risk Analysis affects Business, Projects, and Suppliers

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It takes a village to produce a design from concept to realization. Everyone along the way seems to think of risk a little bit differently. Designers are both directly and indirectly involved with all these risk management methods, but it’s important to understand who is looking at what type of information. Why? Because of communication. One group…

A big failure and too many causes? Try this analysis.

Headphones illustrations by Storyset

We have identified a failure of our design. It’s a complicated failure that has multiple potential root causes, and some that are conditional. Is there a tool that can capture it all and help us prioritize our reactions to get rid of this problem? Yes, there is: Fault Tree Analysis! Learn what it is and…