Category: toyota

Multiple options for success

November 27, 2006 by Artem

In a lot of large software projects there are some very critical requirements that require very critical choices be made early. For example, when building large web-application that has to sustain millions of requests per minute, a choice of the database, database schema and scalability options can play a critical role, yet it might be impossible to decide upfront which option suits your needs better. Typical agile-style decision would be to run a couple of architecture spikes to stress-test the potential solutions. Unfortunately sometimes such trials can take as much time as a half of the whole project.

Toyota's Five Why's

March 10, 2006 by Artem

Toyota is one of the industry leaders known both for its quality and revenues. It's quality system was being built for decades and quite often the quality of the cars was by an order of magnitude better, than what, say, it's US competitors had to offer.

There are few simple principles behind the Toyota quality system. Here are two of them:

• Built-in-quality
  Quality is not something that is added at the end of the production line. Every major robot that works on the car parts has sensors and intelligence to recognize defects early and either fix them or remove the detail from the line.
• Toyota's five why's