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 Qword, 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.

If you want to know more about the concepts I'm talking about in the glossary of terms videos, it will probably help you if you take a look at the leadership in test online class that I created a year or two ago, it covers some of the topics in more detail and obviously provides more of a structured approach to explanations of the concepts. It also gives you some idea of how to do some of the things I talk about. I hope you can take a look at it and get value out of it. The link is here: https://bit.ly/leadintest