Much of the ideas of agile for software development came from other industries and processes, one example is Toyota Production System in the car industry.
On Exterme programming explained, second edition, by Kent Beck, some parallels are stated:
Every worker is responsible for the whole production line. If anyone spots a defect he pulls a cord that stops the whole line. All the resources of the line are applied to finding the root cause of the problem and fixing it.
Unlike mass-production lines where someone “down the line” is responsible for quality, in Toyota Product System the goal is to make the quality of the line good enough that there is no need for downstream quality assurance. This implies that everyone is responsible for quality.
Individual workers have a lot of say in how work is performed and improved in Toyota Production System. Waste is eliminated through kaizen (continuous improvement) events. Workers identify a source of waste, either quality problems or inefficiency. Then, they take the lead in analyzing the problem, performing experiments, and standardizing the results.
Industrial engineers begin their careers working on the line and always spend a considerable amount of time in the factory. Ordinary workers perform routine maintenance instead of an elite caste of technicians. There is no separate quality organization. The whole organization is a quality organization.
Workers are accountable for the quality of their work because the parts they create are immediately put to use by the next step in the line.
This sounds to me like a DevOps approach. Read Acelerate, for example.
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