What is 5S on documentation?
The “5S” approach was invented at Toyota, between the 50’s and 70’s and popularized in the 80’s [Miller 2017-2] and some 5S experts define its origin in the XVIth c. with Venetian Arsenal [Miller 2017] [Cruz 2018] which would have supposedly demonstrated to King Henry III of France their ability to build a ship in 2hrs [see https://www.quality-assurance-solutions.com/History-of-5S.html].
“5S” is a Lean Management technique which takes care of an asset.
For more detail about this notion, please refer to 5S on test cases.
Impact of 5S on documentation on the testing maturity
Naturally, applying 5S to the documentation implies any kind of documentation, especially if it is part of the testing asset…
Automating documentation updates can notably be implemented thanks to the Living Documentation.
When documentation cannot be automated, here are 4 examples that demonstrate the 5S usage on documentation:
- “gray” documents may tell the wrong thing - tagging such document informs the reader about its status
- Long or badly written documents requires readability improvements
- Duplicated information or weakly organized document relationships will lead to extra work or errors
- When a document has no longer been read for a while, the document may experience issues from context changes. Maintaining such a document will inevitably lead to decommissioning because the ROI will not be worthy any longer.
Tags can then be used to sort and group documents. They provide clear information about any item so that teams can plan or take the appropriate improvement action while visiting the document.
Agilitest’s standpoint about 5S on documentation
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