Quality Gate

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Quality gates are points in the course of a development project at which the approval of the next project step is decided on the basis of clearly defined quality criteria in advance.

Use and design

Quality gates are a further development and refinement of the milestone technology.

Development processes cannot be fully planned. You have, especially in the early project phases, creative or even open-ended parts. The stage gate model tries to do justice to this problem . Development risks and ideas that are destined to fail should be identified at an early stage. Quality gates are set at those points in the product development process to which resources are allocated. They are flexible in terms of time, but clearly formulated in terms of content.

When it comes to milestones, the focus is on the time aspect: certain results must be achieved by set dates. In practice, this often leads to milestones being “run over”. Quality gates, on the other hand, are synchronization points at which measurable quality criteria must be met. If this is not the case, the next project phase cannot be started. According to the engineering scientist Thomas Prefi  , a "run over" is impossible.

According to Prefi, the term quality gates is also being accepted by employees and managers because it corresponds to their natural perception of quality. The introduction of additional quality gates before the major milestones of the start of production and market launch serve to rectify errors at an early stage. Instead of a large error backlog at these two bottlenecks, there are several small, more manageable test points with the possibility of stabilizing the project.

Quality gates serve on the one hand to control quality by setting quality-dependent synchronization points in the project, and on the other hand to measure quality. Checklists from product and process audits can be used to design them.

Quality gates in industrial manufacturing

Quality-controlled phase models are typical , for example, in the automotive , aviation and plant engineering industries . Quality Gates find specific expressions and terms in each company. BMW uses the terms gateway and synchro point . At Audi one speaks of Q-Checks . General Motors formed the terms Readiness Review and Moments of Truth , while at Daimler-Benz the term Quality Gate is used as such.

Quality gates in automotive engineering, at Daimler-Chrysler in the 1990s.

The figure shows an example of quality gates as fixed points in the product development process:

Quality gates in the software industry

Quality gates in software development.

In the example, a distinction is made between internal and external quality gates. Internal gates check internal requirements such as load behavior or code quality . External gates check the fulfillment of customer requirements, for example robustness against incorrect entries or operability of the user interface .

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Jochen Peter Sondermann: Internal quality requirements and requirements assessment . In: Tilo Pfeifer, Robert Schmitt (Hrsg.): Masing handbook quality management . S. 400 .
  2. ↑ a b c Jochen Peter Sondermann: Internal quality requirements and requirements assessment . In: Tilo Pfeifer, Robert Schmitt (Hrsg.): Masing handbook quality management . S. 402 .
  3. ^ Robert G. Cooper: Top or Flop in Product Development .
  4. ↑ a b c d e f Thomas Prefi: Quality management in product development . In: Tilo Pfeifer, Robert Schmitt (Hrsg.): Masing handbook quality management . S. 417-418 .
  5. ↑ Nicholas Hawlitzky: Integrated quality controlling of business processes .