By: Mark Barnabei
Quality Management is a much broader field that ensures the required level of quality is achieved in software product. You can create a standard quality management approach for your organization. It has four main sub processes: quality assurance, quality planning, quality control and quality improvement.
Quality Assurance, QA, is a planned and systematic way of creating an environment to assure that the product being developed or service offered meets the quality requirements. QA refers to the implementation of well-defined standard practices and methods. It is a pro-active quality process. This process is controlled and determined at managerial level. Quality assurance focuses on the process checklists, process standards, project audits, methodology and procedures for development. It is a preventive process that aims at establishing the correct methodology and standards to provide a quality conducive environment to the product being developed.
Quality Control, QC, is the set of activities that control the quality of product being developed by identifying any bugs that might be present. Quality control process is a subset that falls under the quality assurance. It is a corrective process. The task of actual testing is performed to find out and identify the bugs present in the product. The bugs are raised to the developers, who then try to fix them. After fixes, the product is verified again such that the functionalities and features are working as required. QC process assures that that the product being developed is of the required quality. Examples of quality control activities include inspection, deliverable peer reviews and the software testing process.
