History
Q-AQuality has always been something society has strived for since ancient human civilization. It can derive back as far as specifications for buildings in ancient Greece to the Egyptians building the pyramids. For the sake of quality in products, the principles seen in modern quality assurance first came prominent with guilds in the Middle Ages. Guilds were formed in part to build a standard of quality dictated by monarchs for certain trades, such as, blacksmithing. Goods would be inspected by other guild masters to ensure that a standard of quality was maintained by members within the guild. In addition, you could not officially master a trade until you had created a masterpiece of a particular quality. Guilds lasted until the late 19th century, and dissipated, at least in part, due to the Industrial Revolution. The guilds hindered free trade, so they were done away with almost completely. The Industrial Revolution started the modern ideology of quality assurance. Instead of skilled craftsmen joining guilds to make a living, these craftsmen had to work in factories. This was due to the methods prescribed by Frederick Winslow Taylor. Taylor was an American mechanical engineer whose ideas pushed the methods of efficiency and productivity in manufacturing. These methods included training employees rather than having them train themselves, implementing and enforcing stringent documentation and protocol based on scientific study, and dispersing work equally among workers and managers. This philosophy became known as scientific management. From the methodologies of scientific management came the work of Walter Shewhart, who, in the 1930s, improved on the system Taylor had made famous. Shewhart was an expert in quality at Bell Labs and saw that there was a growing need for quality improvements. He introduced the use of plan-do-study-act (PDSA) in the development process. It was this system that first introduced cycles for increasing quality. After WWII, General
