Quality assurance:
Quality assurance is an activity which establishes & evaluates the process that produce products
QA measures the process to identify the weaknesses & correct those weaknesses to continually improve the process
Quality assurance is a staff function, responsible for implementing the quality policy
defined through the development and continuous improvement of software development
processes.
Staff function: A staff function is a secondary business activity that supports the line functions of a business to achieve the objectives. The nature of this function is advisory. The people belonging to this function investigate, research, and give advice to their line managers.
Quality Control: Quality control is the process by which product quality is compared with applicable standards, and the action taken when nonconformance is detected.
Quality control is a line function, and the work is done within a process to ensure that the work product conforms to standards andrequirements.
Quality control activities focus on identifying defects in the actual products produced. These
activities begin at the start of the software development process with reviews of requirements,
and continue until all application testing is complete.
The following statements help differentiate quality control from quality assurance:
• Quality control relates to a specific product or service.
• Quality control verifies whether specific attribute(s) are in, or are not in, a specific product or service.
• Quality control identifies defects for the primary purpose of correcting defects.
• Quality control is the responsibility of the team/worker.
• Quality control is concerned with a specific product.
• Quality assurance helps establish processes.
• Quality assurance sets up measurement programs to evaluate processes.
• Quality assurance identifies weaknesses in processes and improves them.
• Quality assurance is a management responsibility, frequently performed by a staff
function.
• Quality assurance is concerned with all of the products that will ever be produced by a
process.
• Quality assurance is sometimes called quality control over quality control because it
evaluates whether quality control is working.
• Quality assurance personnel should never perform quality control unless it is to
validate quality control.
Regards,
Pavankumar Nandagiri..............
