Companies gives paramount importance to the “quality” of software produced. The meaning of quality from IT’s and customer’s view is different. From IT’s view, quality means the product or software is free from defect and has met the requirements, while for customer’s view, it means ‘fit for use’ or the software met what they need. In IT industry, people often confuse quality assurance with quality control. This article will explain the difference between QA and QC.
Quality Assurance (QA)
Software Quality Assurance is a set of activities where processes are established and continuously improved to produce quality products or software. It includes activities like facilitation, training, measurement, and analysis to provide ample confidence that the product or software conforms to specifications and requirements, and fits to what user needs.
Quality Assurance…
- is a management responsibility. It is often performed by a staff function, responsible for implementing quality policy defined. QA personnel should not perform QC unless it is to validate QC. It is sometimes called quality control over quality control because it evaluates whether QC is working.
- helps to establish processes and continuously improving them.
- identifies weaknesses in processes and improves them.
- sets up the measurement programs to evaluate processes.
- its concern is with all the products or software that will be produced by a process.
- We can say QA is process oriented
Quality Control (QC)
Quality Control is the process where product or software’s quality is evaluated and compared with applicable standards, and the action taken when failure to comply to the standards is detected. Also, it is a line function where the work is done within a process that ensures that the software conforms to standards and requirements. The focus in quality control is to identify defects in the actual products or software produced and removal of the defects found. These activities begin from the start of the software development until all application testing is complete.
Quality Control…
- is the responsibility of the testing team.
- relates to a specific product or service to ensure that applicable standards are fulfilled.
- verifies whether specific feature or standard are, or are not in, a particular product or software.
- is identifying defects and correcting them.
- is concerned with a precise product or software.
- We can say QC is product oriented.