What is Quality?

Everyone uses the Q word, and by that, I mean the word quality, of course. But what is quality? What does the word actually mean? It seems to mean everything generally good to everybody, but in fact there's a whole range of types of definitions for that word for different purposes, obviously in different industries, of course.

I'm going to talk about eight, just to give you a sense of the difficulty we have with a single word. Certainly, if you're talking to someone and they're using the word quality, you need to understand what their definition is for you to understand what they're actually talking about. I have to say that I generally try and avoid the Q-word, but it's a necessary evil. It's a shorthand for good versus bad, acceptable versus not acceptable. It's a commonly used word - of course it is. It's everywhere and in job titles as well.

Does the word quality really belong in an engineer's vocabulary?

There are more definitions of quality than almost any other word in our vocabulary. I want to look more closely at some of the types of definitions that are out there that get used. I'm drawing on an article on a website, the link you can see below, suggesting seven variations of definitions of quality. I'm going to add an 8th, by the way.