Acknowledgments

We are indebted to many individuals who have contributed to the development of this book over the last few years.

We want to thank the reviewers and critics of various drafts:

Richard A. DeLyser, University of St. Thomas

Paul Holser

Steve Janiszewski, PS & J Software Six Sigma

Patrick L. Jarvis, University of St. Thomas

H. Richard Lawson, Lawson Software, Inc.

Bhabani Misra, University of St. Thomas

Richard D. Patton, Lawson Software, Inc.

German J. Pliego, University of St. Thomas

In particular, we would like to express our deepest gratitude to Prof. C. V. Ramamoorthy of the University of California, Berkeley for his wise and patient counsel throughout the last three years. This book would have been a very different product without his guidance.

We are grateful to two generations of scholars who have influenced our work. In particular, we would like to mention Yoji Akao, Genrich Altschuller, Philip Crosby, W. Edwards Deming, Eliyahu Goldratt, Hiroyuki Hirano, Kaoru Ishikawa, Joseph Juran, Shigeru Mizuno, Taichi Ohno, Stewart Pugh, Thomas L. Satty, Walter A. Shewhart, Shigeo Shingo, and Genichi Taguchi. We would also like to thank Barry W. Boehm, Maurice H. Halstead, and B. Kanchana, whose work we have cited extensively. The number of scholars are too numerous for us not to miss any. We acknowledge the work of all of them.

Numerous practitioners have inspired us too. We want to mention Craig Mundie of Microsoft Corporation, whose white paper on trustworthy computing triggered our own thought process on the formidable challenges of trustworthy software. We thank Craig for his work and friendship over the years. Two corporate titans we have never met or discussed our project with were inspirational to our workthe late Eiji Toyoda of Toyota Motor Corporation and Jack Welch, the former chairman of General Electric. Their work and able stewardship of two of the world's foremost corporations are great examples of leadership by quality. We have extensively quoted GE and Toyota in this book. We thank both of them.

We would like to express our gratitude to Glenn Mazur, Mike Jones of Expert Choice, Inc. and Ranjit Roy of Nutek, Inc. for software support for the book. We would like to thank Paul O'Mara and Alice Haley of ASQ, Linda Nicol and Linda Hart of Cambridge University Press, Peter O'Toole of GE, Tina B. Gordon of Johnson & Johnson, Michelle Thibodeau of Pearson Education, Lia Rojales of Productivity Press, and Richard Zultner of Zultner & Co. for permission to use relevant copyrighted material.

It is a great pleasure to express our great appreciation to the Prentice Hall team led by Bernard Goodwin, who is simply the best. He, Michelle Housley, Stephane Nakib, and Beth Wickenhiser were just wonderful. The project editor Andrew Beaster and copy editor Gayle Johnson have indeed done a superb job. A big thank you to all of them!

Finally, we would like to thank the contributing authors: Andrew Bolt, Jack Campanella, Ernest Forman of George Washington University, Herb Krasner of the University of Texas at Austin, Glenn Mazur of QFD Institute, and Richard Zultner of Zultner and Co. They have enriched the book with their contributions. We are forever indebted to them for their insight, wisdom, and generosity.