Quality Assurance
Quality assurance (QA) is a quality management process that consists of establishing standards, guidelines and procedures to prevent quality issues and maintain the integrity of the product or service throughout its development.
Quality assurance is often confused with quality control (QC), another component of a quality management system. A quality management system is a set of methods and tools that lets organizations manage all aspects of quality management including quality planning, quality assurance, quality control and quality improvement.
A quality manager is involved with all areas of a quality management system. Quality managers work closely with different team members to ensure quality assurance aligns with quality planning, quality control, quality improvement and the organization’s strategic goals.
Quality assurance uses a quality system that is set up to implement administrative and procedural tasks, which create goals for the product or service of the project. This provides a systematic measurement and comparison with a standard, along with a monitory of processes and a feedback loop to make sure no errors pass through production. Quality control, however, is primarily just focused on process output.
