Unlimited energy and unlimited money. Who cares if the spaceship weights 20 tons or 200 tons - it makes no difference. Need an expert in something - make them an offer they won't refuse. Devote an entire steel plant to making the hull. No need to worry about contractual obligations or loss of sales. Order complex and expensive equipment on a hunch. No need to make sure it will be cost effective when cost is no problem and neither is weight or size.

I guess that's what appealed to me. This freedom these two guys had from constraints. They could conceive of something and it almost appeared as if by magic. They didn't have to go to school or obey the laws of physics. They didn't have to contend with the reality of human endeavors; the need to accomplish tasks with limited resources.

From daylight until late in the evening Seaton worked in the shop, sometimes supervising expert mechanics, sometimes working alone. [...] While he did not forget Dorothy, he had a terrific lot to do and none of it was getting done. He was going to see her just as soon as he was over this hump, he insisted; but every hump was followed by another, higher and worse. And day after day went by. Meanwhile, Dorothy was feeling considerably glum. Here was her engagement only a week old - and what an engagement! Before that enchanted evening he had been an almost nightly visitor.

E.E. Smith, The Skylark of Space, Pyrimid Books, 1958.

It matters to most people if the product satisfies their needs. No one is paid unlimited amounts to build something that may be of interest only to themselves. No one, knowingly, buys a product that won't do the job.

Success is living within your constraints. Under contract review we discussed obtaining the constraints (requirements) for a product. Now, after obtaining, negotiating, and reviewing the contract, we must make sure that we satisfy it. We must live under the constraints imposed.

4.4 Design Control 4.4.1 General

The supplier shall establish and maintain documented procedures to control and verify the design of the product in order to ensure that the specified requirements are met.

The key to this ISO 9001 requirement is "to control and verify". In other words, the standard requires us to make sure that the design results in a product that meets the constraints. We control the design to make sure that the constraints are addressed. We use documented procedures whose purpose is to discipline the design process.

And, we do this by verifying the design, This means that we have procedures for testing the design to see if the constraints are met.

We won't be able to design our spaceship in a week or build it in a month. But, it won't take unlimited money to build it and unlimited power to fly it either.

Should these documented procedures tell us how to design some product? Well, if we could come up with procedures that did, we would have a real popular "killer app" to sell. These procedures don't tell us how; that's what we get paid for - to exercise our brains and come up with a design. These procedures shouldn't tell us to use Booch diagrams or to code in Java. Instead, we should create procedures that guide us in doing a design. These procedures should talk about planning, organization, communication, reviewing, and testing. We will discuss this more explicitly in the coming essays.

Good quality is never achieved by accident.

Ishihara, Implementing Quality on the Shop Floor: A Practical Guide, Quality Resources, 1992.