Gaithersburg, MD 20899. A federal agency under the Department of Commerce. originally established by an act of Congress on March 3, 1901 as the National Bureau of Standards. The Institute's overall goal is to strengthen and advance the Nation's science and technology and facilitate their effective application for public benefit. The National Computer Systems Laboratory conducts research and provides, among other things, the technical foundation for computer related policies of the Federal Government

In the context of quality management, noise is essentially variability. For example, if you are making ketchup, noise in the process comes from variations in the quality of incoming tomatoes, in changes in ambient temperature and humidity, in variations in machinery performance, in variations in the quality of human factors, etc.

Unordered categories which indicate membership or non membership with no implication of quantity, i.e., assembly area number one, part numbers, etc

A structured brainstorming technique that allows a group or team to quickly come to consensus on the importance of issues, problems or solutions. Based on individual contributions, equal footing of team members and prioritization of issues

An activity performed in a process that does not add value to the output product or service, which may or may not have a valid business reason for being performed

Product or material which does not conform to the customer specifications and/or requirements. Sometimes used interchangeably with non-conformity

Product which does not conform to the customer specifications and/or requirements. Same as Non-Conformance

(1) Examines software elements that are not designated safety-critical and ensures that these elements do not cause a hazard. (2) Examines portions of the code that are not considered safety-critical code to ensure they do not cause hazards. Generally, safety-critical code should be isolated from non-safety-critical code. This analysis is to show this isolation is complete and that interfaces between safety-critical code and non-safety-critical code do not create hazards

A condition within a unit which does not conform to some specific specification, standard, and/or requirement; often referred to as a defect; any given nonconforming unit can have the potential for more than one nonconformity/Or/the nonfulfillment of a specified requirement (see also “blemish”, “defect”, and “imperfection”)

A continuous, symmetrical density function characterized by a bell shaped curve, e.g., distribution of sampling averages

(defect-based)--the geometric average throughput yield one would expect at any given step in the process. Analogous to the "typical" yield. For a k -step process, the normalized yield would be the kth root of the rolled throughput yield. A note of caution: This metric can be misleading if the throughput yields of the process steps vary a great deal

Is typically a hypothesis of no difference. That is why the word "null" in "null hypothesis" is used -- it is the hypothesis of no difference. Despite the "null" in "null hypothesis," there are occasions when the parameter is not hypothesized to be 0. For example the null hypothesis may be that the parameter is equal to a specific value

A control chart for evaluating the stability of a process in terms of the total number of units in a sample in which an event of a given classification occurs