ITPEC IP October 2023 Question 54
A system development project has more defects than the quality targets. In order to clarify the issues to prioritize for resolution, the number of defects for each cause is to be investigated and shown with a chart. Which of the following is an appropriate chart to use?
Explanation
Pareto chart — bars of the defect count for each cause, sorted from largest to smallest, with a cumulative line, show which causes to tackle first.
A Pareto chart draws one bar per category in descending order and a line of the cumulative percentage over them. Usually a few causes account for most of the defects: where the cumulative line rises steeply are the causes whose resolution removes the most defects, so they get priority.
Answer (b)
Why not others:
- •(a) — a cause-and-effect (fishbone) diagram arranges the possible causes of one effect in branches; it shows no counts, so it cannot rank them
- •(c) — a scatter diagram plots pairs of two quantities to show whether they are correlated
- •(d) — a flowchart shows the steps and branches of a procedure
Key rule: To decide which category to tackle first, rank the counts with a Pareto chart; to list what might cause a problem, use a fishbone diagram; to check whether two quantities are related, use a scatter diagram.
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