Quality Assurance (QA) and Quality Control (QC) are both essential for developing high-quality software. QA focuses on preventing defects or minimizing their occurrence before delivery by ensuring that appropriate methods and procedures are followed during the software development. In contrast, QC identifies and fixes defects or errors after development. This blog will explore the key differences between Quality Assurance and Quality Control.

What is Quality Assurance?

Quality and assurance are broad terms. Assurance refers to enterprise management practices that ensure the developed product performs at its best. It builds trust in advance by guaranteeing that the outcome will be beneficial. Quality assurance (QA) focuses on establishing standards and procedures to ensure that a product meets consumer expectations and functions correctly. In short, QA encompasses all efforts aimed at defining and maintaining quality standards in software development.

Why Is QA Significant?

QA is essential because it helps businesses establish strategies for training, documentation, monitoring, and audits during production. Furthermore, it is a continuous effort to improve and maintain quality. QA guidelines also keep projects on track by aligning team members on collaboration practices and methods, such as code reviews in software development.

Quality Assurance Key Characteristics

• To ensure continuous product quality, QA emphasizes the development and application of reliable processes.
• Quality Assurance (QA) aims to prevent errors by improving procedures and ensuring that quality is built into the product from the start.
• To enhance quality over time, QA involves continuous process evaluation and improvement.

What is Quality Control?

Quality control is a software testing procedure that ensures products or services meet the quality management system’s standards. Statistical tools and techniques applied at the final stage of a software product are known as Statistical Quality Control. Unlike quality assurance, which focuses on processes, quality control examines the quality of the final product. Quality control (QC) is product-oriented and emphasizes the outcome. Its main purpose is to give businesses confidence that their app meets quality requirements.

Why Is QC Significant?

QC identifies and corrects problems as they arise to ensure the final product meets the highest possible quality standards. Furthermore, QC may include software testing, beta testing, or canary testing, which provide valuable insights for future products. Without QC, an organization cannot be certain that the product functions as intended and meets customer needs.

Quality Control Key Features

• The reactive process of QC helps identify and correct errors in the completed product, focusing more on detecting problems than resolving them.
• Through proper testing and inspection, the primary goal is to identify faults as early as possible.
• This process involves examining, assessing, and verifying the product to ensure it meets the required quality standards.

Understanding Quality Assurance vs Quality Control

Quality control is deliberated as a reactive procedure that emphasizes categorizing and resolving problems that arise in the final product after it has reached consumers. Furthermore, quality assurance is a proactive procedure mainly concerned with making sure quality requirements are met before the product or service is released to the public.

The quality assurance team’s emphasis is more deeply on development procedures. In contrast, quality control activities center on the product. Since software development is an iterative process wherein products are consistently revised, updated, and patched, quality assurance teams working with software products may need reactive processes or quality control approaches as well.

Key Differences of Quality Assurance vs Quality Control

After a brief introduction to QA vs QC in the business world, let’s have a quick look more closely at the main difference between quality control and assurance.

Main Objective:

QA comes with the primary objective of ensuring adherence to recognized procedures and standards. It aims for reliability in the production process.

QC’s main objective is to verify that the final product meets specified requirements and is free from flaws before it is released to consumers.

Timing:

QA activities occur throughout the entire production process, from planning to execution. It ensures that processes are followed appropriately.

QC activities typically take place after the production process when the final product is ready for testing.

Concentration:

QA is proactive. It aims to prevent defects before they occur by ensuring adherence to established procedures and standards.

QC is reactive. It focuses on correcting flaws after production and is primarily centered on confirming that the final product meets specified requirements.

Activities:

QA activities embrace process planning, documentation, training, and continuous improvement efforts to inaugurate and maintain vigorous processes.

QC activities embrace inspection, testing, flaw identification, and modification to make sure that the final product meets quality criteria.

Engrossment:

QA involves every aspect of the business, from top management to frontline workers, by focusing on creating and maintaining quality procedures.

QC mainly involves inspectors and quality control personnel who are responsible for reviewing and testing the final product.

Assessment Nature:

QA inspection emphasizes processes and system adherence, ensuring that the production process follows established protocols.

QC inspection focuses on the final product or output, examining it for defects or deviations from specifications.

Timeline Influence:

QA has a long-term influence on the entire production process by establishing robust protocols that prevent faults over time.

QC has an immediate impact on the specific batch or product being inspected, ensuring that defects are detected and corrected before reaching consumers.

Quality Assurance and Quality Control implementation strategies offer numerous advantages for your business’s overall success as follows:

• Quality assurance and quality control procedures ensure consistent product or service quality, fostering customer satisfaction.
• Both help reduce costs and minimize expenses related to product failures by preventing quality issues and ensuring products meet required standards.
• Businesses can effectively implement QA and QC processes to demonstrate their commitment to quality, establishing a strong reputation for delivering products that align with customer expectations.
• They can enhance production efficiency by reducing the time required to produce, inspect, and test products or services.
• Quality assurance and quality control procedures facilitate continuous improvement by enabling businesses to identify and address quality issues, implement changes, and monitor their impact. Microsoft Dynamics 365 Support Services are also helpful in this regard.

Conclusion

Businesses consider quality assurance and quality control crucial to an effective quality management system, as both concepts help ensure the quality of a product or service. Therefore, they differ in their scope and focus. Quality control goals to classify defects or problems with a product or service. Quality assurance aims to avert those defects from occurring in the first place.