In AT&T, intensive attention to quality is becoming standard practice as the business units and research divisions institute procedures to improve their business and engineering processes. Our aim is to achieve total quality by satisfying customers and improving the functioning and efficiency of the processes we use to bring our products and services to market. How we adapt and improve these processes to serve and fulfill customer needs determines the company's capability to win in the marketplace. This issue of the AT&T Technical Journal presents a mosaic of some of the company‐wide efforts to improve quality.

Market dynamics and shorter product‐development life cycles are challenging AT&T to recast its project structures and establish well‐defined processes and methodologies for developing new technology. AT&T's success in competitive markets, today, depends on how it determines the processes required to produce and deliver the “right” products and services to its customers, at a price they are willing to pay, when they want them. This issue of the AT&T Technical Journal focuses on current initiatives that are under way in the AT&T R&D community to define the processes and methodologies used in developing new technology. The papers document the activities of a variety of hardware and software development and manufacturing projects and showcase methodologies that affect the technology that AT&T offers commercially.