Quality by Design
20 October 1987
No step is more critical for quality in bringing a new product to market than R&D. It is in the design and development organizations that products are defined, features and functions selected, reliability objectives set, architectures determined, components selected, and requirements and specifications set. These decisions directly affect the cost, the manufacturability, the field performance and the customer satisfaction. In AT&T Bell Laboratories in recent years we have developed and applied many new methods in quality in R&D, what we call Quality By Design. These methods include new ways for product definition, reliability engineering, robust product and process design and software quality.