Quality Assurance

Quality assurance is a way of:

• Halting miscalculations or defects in the products/ software(s) that are being manufactured/ fabricated or developed.
• Avoiding problems that may arise while delivering solutions or services to customers.

It is defined as a part of quality management which is focused on offering confidence that quality requirements will surely be fulfilled. The defect prevention in quality assurance differs subtly from error detection and rejection of quality control. It has also been mentioned to as a shift left as it focuses on quality earlier in the process.

Quality assurance primarily highlights the administrative and procedural activities implemented in a quality system so that the goals for a software product, service or activity are achieved. It is basically the systematic measurement, collation with a standard, monitoring of processes and an associated feedback loop that confers prevention of the error.

Two basic principles included in quality assurance are:

• Fit for purpose i.e. the software should be suitable for the intended purpose.
• Right first time i.e. mistakes should be subsequently eliminated.

Approaches to quality assurance:

• Failure Testing:-

  It is a valuable process to be carried out on a whole consumer product. It is also referred to as stress testing. In other terms, this is the operation of a product until it fails. This unveils many precipitous weaknesses in a product/software, and the data is used to drive engineering and manufacturing process improvements. Usually, simple changes can transform and improve the product/software service dramatically.

• Statistical Control:-

  This is based on the analysis of the objective and the subjective data. Statistical process control is used by many organizations or firms as an essential tool in any quality improvement effort to track quality data. Any product/software can be demographically charted as long as they have a standard or special cause variance to track.

• Total Quality Management:-

  The quality of any product is dependent on the participating constituents, some of which are sustainable and controlled effectively whereas others are not. All those processes which are managed with quality assurance fall under total quality management.

• Models and Standards:-

  There are around 15 management and 10 technical requirements that have been generally specified. These conditions delineate what a laboratory must do to become authorized. The CMMI model is used widely to implement process and product quality assurance in an organization.