There is a rather large family of test methods associated with Qualitative Accelerated Tests. They're also known as RETs (or Reliability Enhancement Tests). 

Today, we’re focused on the models that are used to help us with the design. Awareness about these methods will help us with future test plans and project management. We talk about environmental stress testing and remind ourselves a little about HALT.

Visit the podcast blog for a transcript.

If you'd like to explore some of today's topics more, then I recommend these other QDD podcasts.

Episode 6: HALT! Watch out for that weakest link. 

Episode 36: When to use DOE (Design of Experiments) 

Episode 37: Results-Driven Decisions, Faster: Accelerated Stress Testing as a Reliability Life Test 

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If your team is still catching problems too late — let's talk.
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→ Pierce the Design Fog 

ABOUT DIANNA
 Dianna Deeney is a product development process strategist with over 25 years of experience in regulated industries. She is president of Deeney Enterprises, LLC, where she helps product development teams make better decisions upstream — before costly design mistakes get built in. 

We’re developing requirements for our product, including setting reliability requirements. Or we’re setting acceptance criteria for our test plans.

What confidence levels do we choose? We don’t have to blindly set them - we can base it off the risks of failure, using our FMEA (failure mode effects analysis). FMEA is a great tool for us to refer to, to help us choose a relevant confidence level by basing our decision on one or more metrics that the FMEA can provide. 

Send us a message

If your team is still catching problems too late — let's talk.
→ Schedule a free discovery call: Dianna's calendar

Get the full framework.
→ Pierce the Design Fog 

ABOUT DIANNA
 Dianna Deeney is a product development process strategist with over 25 years of experience in regulated industries. She is president of Deeney Enterprises, LLC, where she helps product development teams make better decisions upstream — before costly design mistakes get built in. 

We’re starting to populate an FMEA table with our team. We get it started, but then we get stuck in disagreements. Or we think we finish it and then we don’t know what to do with it.

We can avoid these headaches with a little planning (or maybe a lot of planning - it depends on the project). We talk about risk management planning as it relates to FMEA.

Visit the podcast blog for a transcript.

Send us a message

If your team is still catching problems too late — let's talk.
→ Schedule a free discovery call: Dianna's calendar

Get the full framework.
→ Pierce the Design Fog 

ABOUT DIANNA
 Dianna Deeney is a product development process strategist with over 25 years of experience in regulated industries. She is president of Deeney Enterprises, LLC, where she helps product development teams make better decisions upstream — before costly design mistakes get built in. 

It's almost a new calendar year!
We look back at the most popular episodes, my favorite episodes, recommendations for conferences, and a look ahead at what 2022 will bring to Quality during Design.

Subscribe for a weekly newsletter and to keep up to date with the new offerings in 2022.
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Thank you for listening in 2021, and I look forward to working with you more in 2022.

Send us a message

If your team is still catching problems too late — let's talk.
→ Schedule a free discovery call: Dianna's calendar

Get the full framework.
→ Pierce the Design Fog 

ABOUT DIANNA
 Dianna Deeney is a product development process strategist with over 25 years of experience in regulated industries. She is president of Deeney Enterprises, LLC, where she helps product development teams make better decisions upstream — before costly design mistakes get built in. 

We talk about the 8D methodology, describe situations where we could benefit from it, list each of the 8 Disciplines, and compare it to PDSA and DMAIC.

Check the podcast blog for the stopwatch graphic from Chris S.P. Visser, download a summary sheet, my book recommendation, and a link to 8D forms.

Send us a message

If your team is still catching problems too late — let's talk.
→ Schedule a free discovery call: Dianna's calendar

Get the full framework.
→ Pierce the Design Fog 

ABOUT DIANNA
 Dianna Deeney is a product development process strategist with over 25 years of experience in regulated industries. She is president of Deeney Enterprises, LLC, where she helps product development teams make better decisions upstream — before costly design mistakes get built in. 

How do we go about mistake-proofing our product design? There are steps we can take and a checklist we can use, based on a well-known manufacturing production method: poka-yoke.

Download the guidelines and checklist, and then follow-along with the podcast.

Send us a message

If your team is still catching problems too late — let's talk.
→ Schedule a free discovery call: Dianna's calendar

Get the full framework.
→ Pierce the Design Fog 

ABOUT DIANNA
 Dianna Deeney is a product development process strategist with over 25 years of experience in regulated industries. She is president of Deeney Enterprises, LLC, where she helps product development teams make better decisions upstream — before costly design mistakes get built in. 

We want to engage a reliability engineer in an analysis for our product design. They can help us produce some great information from which we can make decisions. You might be feeling uncomfortable about our team making a design decision based on those results. You don’t quite understand how the reliability engineer came up with the answer. You want to know where that information comes from so you can gauge the level of project risk of our decision.

We peel-back the curtain on reliability engineering methods. We explore reliability engineering's roots and development, from the 1950's through today, to better understand the results of an analysis. Having a general understanding of reliability methods can help us get comfortable with using the results.

Visit the podcast blog for a couple of standards-based references, a recommended reference of an example of Physics of Failure, and the other, related podcasts.

Send us a message

If your team is still catching problems too late — let's talk.
→ Schedule a free discovery call: Dianna's calendar

Get the full framework.
→ Pierce the Design Fog 

ABOUT DIANNA
 Dianna Deeney is a product development process strategist with over 25 years of experience in regulated industries. She is president of Deeney Enterprises, LLC, where she helps product development teams make better decisions upstream — before costly design mistakes get built in. 

There are many stories of design successes attributed to the right level of understanding of the customer. Product designers make decisions, daily, about how a product is going to look and perform. So, we need to really understand the customer. And, to really get the customer, engineers need to spend time with them. 

Sometimes, the business doesn’t want us to interact with the customer or doesn’t think it would be valuable. Objections include that we're not prepared for the user's environment, that we're too blunt or honest, or that we just overgeneralize what we learn, anyway. Or, there's a reluctance because of costs. Besides seeing these objections first hand, someone also listed them out in a published book! This shows that this is common across industries.

Is that fair to design engineers? No matter if it’s fair or not. We can prepare ourselves to address those objections. We talk about how we can prepare ourselves to self-advocate for more customer face time.

Visit the podcast blog.

Send us a message

If your team is still catching problems too late — let's talk.
→ Schedule a free discovery call: Dianna's calendar

Get the full framework.
→ Pierce the Design Fog 

ABOUT DIANNA
 Dianna Deeney is a product development process strategist with over 25 years of experience in regulated industries. She is president of Deeney Enterprises, LLC, where she helps product development teams make better decisions upstream — before costly design mistakes get built in. 

Within our quality toolbox, there are a lot of graphical organizers. Some are better at fulfilling different goals than others. If we have a goal in mind, then we may choose a certain tool. However, we don’t want analysis paralysis about which tool is best to stop us from using any tool at all. 

I share my 3 general guidelines about choosing a graphical quality tool, how to draw them, and when to use them. 

Plus, we talk about 3 tools in particular, prompted by a social media ask: mind map, process flowchart, and spaghetti diagram. We get into what they are, when we're most likely to use them, and how they can be used for design.

Visit the podcast blog for links to suggested resources and videos.

If you’d like to get more into process flow charting, then there are two previous Quality During Design episodes I recommend:  

Episode 29 “Types of Design Analyses possible with User Process Flowcharts” talks about a lot of various analyses we can do with a process flow chart, like identifying important tasks, making the process more efficient, and performing a costs analysis. 

Episode 2 “My product works. Why don't they want it?” talks about a process flow chart for the user’s process and the appropriate level of detail we may need to identify the true customer needs and requirements for our design.

Send us a message

If your team is still catching problems too late — let's talk.
→ Schedule a free discovery call: Dianna's calendar

Get the full framework.
→ Pierce the Design Fog 

ABOUT DIANNA
 Dianna Deeney is a product development process strategist with over 25 years of experience in regulated industries. She is president of Deeney Enterprises, LLC, where she helps product development teams make better decisions upstream — before costly design mistakes get built in. 

Design for Excellence (DFX) is a concept that includes many initiatives, like design for usability, design for manufacturability and assembly, and design for environment and disassembly. It’s a focus on doing things right, exceeding customer expectations, optimizing what’s needed while minimizing costs, and continuous improvement. 

Today we take a deep dive on one of those aspects: design for environment (DFE), including design for disassembly. What are reasons that a business would consider this important, and how does a design engineer fit in?

Visit the podcast blog for links to additional reading.

Send us a message

If your team is still catching problems too late — let's talk.
→ Schedule a free discovery call: Dianna's calendar

Get the full framework.
→ Pierce the Design Fog 

ABOUT DIANNA
 Dianna Deeney is a product development process strategist with over 25 years of experience in regulated industries. She is president of Deeney Enterprises, LLC, where she helps product development teams make better decisions upstream — before costly design mistakes get built in.