The Deming Cycle: an application to web design

In this post I want to illustrate an application of the Deming Cycle - also know as the PDCA Cycle (Plan, Do, Check, Act) - to web design. If you never heard of Deming Cycle, this model (made popular by Edwards Deming) describes an iterative process designed to drive continuous improvement typically used in business process reengineering and in quality management.
This process has four main steps:

- Plan: establish objectives and define methods to reach them;
- Do: implement what you planned;
- Check: measure and compare obtained results against expected result;
- Act: take action to improve what you implement.

In general, a popular way to represent the Deming Cycle is the following:

This circular approach can be very useful if applyed to web development expecially in order to:

- improve the quality of your work;
- organize your code in code snippets (or classes) to reuse in your projects in order to work faster and more efficiently;
- simplify and rationalize the workflow of activities during development process;


Plan: in this phase you have to establish what are your objectives and the expected output of development process. It's very important to have a clear idea about what you have to do to reach the final result. A plan of main activities can help you manage times during the implementation phase and have a to-do list to follow in order to monitor everyday your progress.

Do: in this phase you have to implement what you planned in the previous step executing the plan of activities identify in the first phase.

Check: in this phase you have to assess the output of development process against expected result in terms of general quality of the final product. You can image the quality as results/total effort. High effort and low results is index of low quality of your work (you spent a lot of energies to reach a bad final product). In general, what you have to do is to find a right compromise between results and effort.
A way to assess your results it is to define "indicators" that measure the differences between what you planned against what you implemented. A simple and very intuitive example of these indicators is the delay between a milestone and the effective date of completion of activities. For each delay, in this phase, you have to study why you fail to respect the plan defined in the first phase of the Deming Cycle. Too ambitious objectives? Bad planning? The study activity is very useful to find answers and avoid the same errors the next time you execute the same process, for example working to a new web project.

Act: in this phase you have to take action in order to improve what you implemented and, more in general, the entire process you followed to develop your output. For example you can organize some parts of code you often use in your web projects in classes or in ready to use code snippets , in order to save a lot of time when you implement them in a new web project.

For a deepening about the Deming Cycle take a look at the following links:

- PDCA Cycle
- Deming Cycle (PDSA)
- W. Edwards Deming

If you have some suggestion please leave a comment, thanks!

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