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What is QA? (QA vs QC)

Quality and Assurance

  • Quality: Quality refers to a product's ability to meet customer expectations in terms of usability, design, reliability, and durability. The definition of quality can be expressed as "fitness for use" or "fitness for purpose." It is based on satisfying the customer's expectations regarding the product's utility, design, reliability, durability, and price.
  • Assurance: This is a guarantee provided that a product or service will operate without any issues in line with expectations.

Distinction Between Quality Assurance (QA) and Quality Control (QC)

Although these two concepts are often confused, their focal points and implementation methods differ:

  • Quality Assurance (QA): A proactive procedure established to ensure an organization provides the best possible product to its customers. It is based on the philosophy of "Right Process = Quality Software" and aims to prevent defects by examining processes. It is also known as QA testing—a procedure to ensure the organization provides the best product or service.
  • Quality Control (QC): Quality Control (QC): This process involves inspecting the final results to analyze the quality of the specific output. Rather than being proactive, it is a reactive approach that checks if a product satisfies customer-defined specifications.Within the realm of software engineering, it is utilized to guarantee that services and products consistently meet quality benchmarks.
  • Core Difference: While QA focuses on processes and guidance, QC concentrates on the product and inspection. QA examines processes and makes changes to those leading to the final product; QC does not deal with processes but inspects the final output to verify its quality.