What is Quality?

Quality is extremely hard to define, and it is simply stated: “Fit for use or purpose.” It is all about meeting the needs and expectations of customers with respect to functionality, design, reliability, durability, & price of the product.
 

What is Assurance?

Assurance is nothing but a positive declaration on a product or service, which gives confidence. It is certainty of a product or a service, which it will work well. It provides a guarantee that the product will work without any problems as per the expectations or requirements.

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What is Quality Assurance?

Quality Assurance is popularly known as QA Testing, is defined as an activity to ensure that an organization is providing the best possible product or service to customers. QA focuses on improving the processes to deliver Quality Products to the customer. An organization has to ensure, that processes are efficient and effective as per the quality standards defined for software products.

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How to do Quality Assurance: Complete Process

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Quality assurance has a defined cycle called PDCA cycle or Deming cycle. The phases of this cycle are:

• Plan

• Do

• Check

• Act

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These above steps are repeated to ensure that processes followed in the organization are evaluated and improved on a periodic basis. Let’s look into the above steps in detail –

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• Plan – Organization should plan and establish the process related objectives and determine the processes that are required to deliver a high-Quality end product.

• Do – Development and testing of Processes and also “do” changes in the processes

• Check – Monitoring of processes, modify the processes, and check whether it meets the predetermined objectives

• Act – Implement actions that are necessary to achieve improvements in the processes

 

An organization must use Quality Assurance to ensure that the product is designed and implemented with correct procedures. This helps reduce problems and errors, in the final product.

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What is Quality Control?

Quality control popularly abbreviated as QC. It is a Software Engineering process used to ensure quality in a product or a service. It does not deal with the processes used to create a product; rather it examines the quality of the “end products” and the final outcome.

The main aim of Quality control is to check whether the products meet the specifications and requirements of the customer. If an issue or problem is identified, it needs to be fixed before delivery to the customer.

QC also evaluates people on their quality level skill sets and imparts training and certifications. This evaluation is required for the service based organization and helps provide “perfect” service to the customers.

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Quality Control and Quality Assurance?

Sometimes, QC is confused with the QA. Quality control is to examine the product or service and check for the result. Quality assurance is to examine the processes and make changes to the processes which led to the end-product.