Quality Assurance vs. Quality Control

Any industry that provides products or services must adhere to quality processes to stay competitive, gain loyal customers, and thrive long-term in the market.

To ensure this, businesses implement methods like Quality Assurance (QA) and Quality Control (QC), and these terms are widely used across industries.

In the digital industry, quality assurance focuses on improving development processes and identifying potential issues early in the development lifecycle, while quality control involves testing and inspection during and after development.

Let's explore the differences between quality assurance and quality control in delivering reliable, high-quality products and services.

A quality management system comprises processes and procedures that help businesses deliver high-quality products and services, meet regulatory standards, and enhance customer satisfaction.

Quality assurance and quality control are components of quality management. Quality assurance focuses on creating processes to ensure quality, while quality control focuses on inspecting products throughout production.

Quality assurance is a process that ensures products and services meet established standards and requirements, improving operational efficiency and customer satisfaction.

Quality assurance is necessary because adhering to these guidelines provides numerous benefits and contributes to the success of an organization.

Quality assurance processes vary across industries. In the digital sector, implementing QA involves following principles that ensure efficiency and that software products meet established quality standards.

These principles include:

Defect Prevention: Defect Prevention: This is a proactive approach that aims to detect issues early in the development lifecycle. Setting up systems and processes reduces the possibility of defects occurring during development.

Continuous Improvement: Consistently assessing and improving the quality of the software processes, practices, and quality ensures that the development process evolves. This process involves assessing development processes, tools, and workflow to maintain good performance and address areas for improvement.

Stakeholder involvement: All stakeholders should be involved in the development process this aids smooth collaboration and communication.

Risk-based approach: quality assurance should focus on identifying and addressing risks in the process to understand their impact on the product performance and security.

The quality assurance typically occurs during the phases of the development lifecycle, and continues throughout the entire process, comprising phases such as:

• Planning: To ensure an effective quality assurance strategy, the process should start with the planning phase. This stage involves defining quality standards, such as performance metrics, that the product must meet.

• Documentation: Documenting stages in quality assurance procedures allows the team to track regulatory compliance, and it also fosters accountability during audit processes.

• Testing: Implementing a proactive approach to detect issues early in the development process can help reduce the risk of non-compliance and failure. Testing before production can reduce the cost of fixing defects or post-release corrections.

• Collaboration: Quality assurance involves cross-functional teams, and inefficient processes can lead to miscommunications, inefficiencies, and delays.

Effective collaboration encourages teams to prioritize quality throughout the development process, fostering unity and promoting feedback. This approach makes the system flexible and responsive to changes.

• Continuous Development: Quality assurance promotes continuous improvement by regularly assessing processes and implementing strategies to enhance them, contributing to long-term organizational growth.

Some key benefits of quality assurance include the following:

• Quality assurance enhances product and service quality, ensuring that they meet quality standards, which can build customer trust and satisfaction.

• Quality assurance processes streamline operations, optimize resource usage, and enhance productivity across departments within an organization.

• Quality assurance ensures that organizations adhere to industry standards and regulatory requirements, such as those established by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), which develops and publishes international standards. Adherence helps prevent violations that could lead to legal issues and penalties.

• Quality assurance protects an organization's reputation by ensuring products are as intended before release. If a product fails to meet expectations or quality standards, it can taint the company's brand and damage its reputation

There are various methods to achieve effective quality assurance:

Statistical Process Control: Statistical process control is a method that employs statistical tools to monitor and control processes, ensuring they operate correctly. These tools can identify quality issues and also measure the effectiveness of processes and teams to improve any flaws during the development and production stages.

Total Quality Management (TQM): This approach engages all employees within a company, fostering a quality-focused mindset across all departments.

Everyone receives training in activities designed to build management capability and enhance processes, ensuring adherence to quality standards and the continuous improvement of products or services.

Process and Product Quality Assurance (PPQA): This approach focuses on setting quality standards and procedures at the organizational level to measure, evaluate, and solve quality management issues.

Quality Models and Standards: International standards provide a framework for organizations to implement quality management systems. These standards lay out requirements for quality assurance and help organizations deliver quality.

For example, Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) is a common method used in software development that involves first assessing the maturity of an organization's processes and then providing a process for continuous improvement.

Quality control is a process designed to ensure products or services meet defined quality standards.

Quality control is often confused with quality assurance. The difference is that quality assurance focuses on establishing and improving processes to prevent issues, while quality control focuses on inspecting and testing the product during and after development to detect and fix defects.

In essence, quality control works hand in hand with quality assurance by focusing on inspecting and testing products meet the organization's quality standards, typically after development.

A few characteristics of quality control include;

Reactive: Quality control is a reactive process that involves finding and fixing issues in a finished product.

Product-oriented: Quality control examines, evaluates, and verifies products to ensure they meet required quality standards.

Defect Identification: Quality control involves testing and inspecting products to find defects early.

Components of quality control include:

Inspection: Regular inspection of products and services identifies issues or non-compliance with quality standards.

Testing: Regular testing is necessary to assess and measure the performance and functionalities of products and services.

Monitoring: Regular monitoring is necessary to ensure that products and services maintain quality.

Documentation: A Detailed record of inspections, tests can help teams trace various test procedures and also keep them accountable.

Corrective Action: Corrective action focuses on implementing measures to address issues and prevent them from happening again.

Continuous Improvement: Analysing data and feedback can help businesses identify areas that need improvement and it helps enhance the quality management system.

This involves testing during various stages of a product's process. Employees commence testing during production or after production.

During these phases of tests, they can identify a problem and take necessary action to prevent recurrence, ensuring the final product complies with the quality standard and meets the customer's expectations.

There is a range of quality control methods depending on the industry, but here are a few:

Control Charts: This chart is used to study how processes change over time.

Process Control: Processes are monitored and adjusted using feedback loops and other methods to ensure quality and improve performance

Acceptance Sampling: This involves inspecting products and services to determine if they are acceptable.

Process Protocol: Ensures that inspection and testing are carried out consistently. It ensures that processes, standards, and documentation required to detect and address defects and help the team maintain product quality and compliance are defined.

There are several benefits of quality control, including:

• Quality control ensures products and services meet required standards and customers' expectations.

• Quality control identifies issues before products reach customers.

• Quality reduces production cost when errors are caught early, saving money on recalls.

• Quality control delivers reliable products and builds customer trust and loyalty

• Quality control provides insights to improve future processes

• Quality control supports feedback, which can help management make better decisions.

Quality assurance and quality control are necessary components of quality management. They help businesses meet and maintain industry standards.

Quality assurance and quality control methods may vary across industries, but their overall goal and purpose are to detect defects early and ensure product meets regulatory requirements and customer satisfaction before and after production.