As a pioneer of adapting lean thinking to software engineering, I have dreamed for a long time of eradicating bugs and building right-first-time software. But the step from very good quality to 0 bugs, at scale, without just relying on stable experienced teams, seemed too hard.
Until I stumbled on a book: the Toyota way of Dantotsu Radical Quality Improvement. A step-by-step, no-bullshit, guide by Sadao Nomura who explains how he reduced defects in four factories already considered world-class in terms of quality… by another 90%!!
This is the story of how this book convinced us that going beyond good quality towards radical “dantotsu” quality is possible, and how we are adapting it at the moment to our software engineering settings with promising results.
Fabrice Bernhard is the co-founder and Group CTO of Theodo, a fast-growing custom digital software consultancy. By adopting devops in 2010, Scrum in 2011 and lean in 2012, Theodo has scaled successfully from 10 to 600 people while continuing to strive for craft-like quality and meaningful work.
Fabrice has shared his experience as a CTO and a lean tech leader at various tech and lean conferences, including DevopsDays, Symfony Live, Lean Digital Summit and Lean Global Connection. He was the cofounder of the paris devops meetup in 2010, president of the French PHP association in 2014, and launched the lean tech leaders meetup in London. He is also the Deputy President of the Franco-British Chamber of Commerce.
