Talk:Product testing

Pre-modern product testing practices

I have been reviewing the literature and I have not been able to find any modern scholarship about pre-modern product testing. It seems strange to me that this could be an entirely modern concept, but I suppose if there was never industrialization with mass production and manufacturing standards then there could not have been an expectation of product uniformity or quality control in previous times. Without standards for products I supposed that no one would ever have thought to apply the concept to labor or the development of standard operating procedures to encourage employees to all behave according to specifications, so perhaps service satisfaction surveys never existed as part of a scholarly discipline either.

I would be curious to know if anyone ever identified a source from pre-modern times when some product or service was reviewed and expected to be of a certain quality to please consumers, and if a regulating agency - perhaps some guild - ever promised work to a specification and acted as a neutral reviewer of the product or service. Blue Rasberry (talk) 16:57, 8 October 2012 (UTC)