Quality control is often looked on by development teams and management as a necessary evil blocking the smooth and swift deployment of new products and new versions of products to the market place. The pervasive attitude seems to be that QC/QA (Quality Control or Quality Assurance.) is a necessary evil but hardly one that anyone can ever enjoy. Companies tend to treat it as if it where a separate entity from development or make it into a separate form of development. Neither of which is cost effective, both of which can have a negative affect on the bottom line.

TQA or if you prefer TQC is not so much a new set of tools as it is a re-newed way of looking at the QC/QA process that is more in line with the way it is handled by nearly every type of industry except software development. From General Motors to General Foods corporations world wide have realized that if you wait until production is finished to begin QC/QA then the cost of QC/QA goes sky high. Product fails to reach the market on time, and the consistency of the product drops to an all time low. QC/QA must begin at an earlier stage before production is finalized if there is any hope of controlling the costs involved, and assuring that the product released is the product you intended to be released.

TQA can best be thought of as a process rather than as an object. It is a process designed to ensure that quality control is invoked at all levels in the production process rather than as an end action. Normal production environments place quality control as the last step before release. This often pushes numerous problems that if handled earlier, would have been small, to the end where they initiate large re-writes. The objective of TQA is to eliminate problems when they occur. By involving QC/QA in the entire cycle the ability to find and fix problems when the impact is the least on the overall cycle.