What is Quality Assurance? [Answered]

During an interview interviewer asks you about quality assurance and quality control.

It makes you confused, now you are trying to explain but not able to satisfy the opposite side of the table.

This single question may decide about your understanding of quality and its basic concepts. Hence may lead the decision maker to put your name in short listed candidates.

This article will help you clearly understand what is quality assurance and how it is different from quality control.

Also you will learn the importance of QA QC in quality management system.

Quality assurance is the main pillar of any business or organization.

Whatever is the business, either construction, finance or a storage facility or any service, quality is the most important aspect, which affects the level of success of the business.

Being an entrepreneur, one should never ever compromise with the quality aspect.

The popularity of your product or service will enhance, only if you provide quality.

Low price is also another way to increase sales. But, if your product or service does not have standard quality, then a customer will never use it in future, even if it has the lowest price.

Thus, you have to assure the quality of your product or service by conducting some scientific measures. When we talk about some measures then comes the question of quality assurance or quality control.

Quality assurance, QA, refers to planned and systematic production processes that provide confidence in a product’s suitability for its intended purpose.

QA is a set of activities intended to ensure that products (goods and/or services) satisfy customer requirements in a systematic, reliable fashion.

Quality assurance alone cannot absolutely guarantee the production of quality products, unfortunately, but makes this more likely. Therefore when we combine quality control with quality assurance it becomes total quality management that is ultimate purpose to achieve best quality.

Two key principles characterize the quality assurance systems reliability:

1. Fit for purpose: the product should be suitable for the intended purpose
2. Right first time: mistakes should be eliminated over the period of time

QA includes regulation of the quality of raw materials, assemblies, products and components; services related to production; and management, production and inspection processes.

What is Software Quality Assurance?

Systematic activities providing evidence of the fitness for use of the total software product.

We can achieve best software quality through the use of established guidelines for quality control to ensure integrity and prolonged life of software.

You can complete a software project by planning to ensure that a software product fulfills criteria and has additional attributes specific to the product.

It is the collection of activities and functions used to monitor and control a software project so that specific objectives are achieved with the desired level of confidence.

Software QA is not the sole responsibility of the software quality assurance group but is determined by the consensus of the project manager ,project leader, project personnel, and the users. 

Evolution of Quality Assurance Concept

Prior to 20th century:  Quality is an art, demand overcome potential production, an era of workmanship.

F. Taylor, 1900s: Scientific approach to management resulting in the greater need for standardization, inspection and supervision.

Shewart, 1930s: Statistical beginning and study of quality control.

Late 1930s: Quality standard and approaches are introduced in France and Japan. Beginning of SQC, reliability etc.

1942: Seminal work by Deming at the ministry of war in USA, concept of acceptance sampling,

1944: Dodge and Deming carried out seminal work on acceptance sampling.

1945: Founding of Japan Standards Association

1946: Founding of the ASQC (American Society for Quality Control)

1950: Visit of Deming in Japan at the invitation of K. Ishikawa

1951: Quality assurance increasingly acceptable

1954: TQC in Japan (Feigenbaum and Juran), book published in 1956

1957: Founding of European Organization for the control of quality (France, Germany, Italy, Holland, England)

1961: The Martin Co. in USA introduced the zero-defect approach. Quality motivation started in USA

1962: Quality Circles are started in Japan

1964: Ishikawa publishes a book on Quality Management

1970: Ishikawa publishes on basics of Quality circle, concepts of Total quality is affirmed and devised in Japanese industries.

1970 to 1980: Just In Time and quality become crucial for competitiveness. A large number of US and European corporations are beginning to appreciate the advance of Japan’s industries.

1980’s: Facing the challenges of quality management, growth of economic based quality control

1990’s: The management of quality became a necessity that recognized at all levels of management. ISO 9001 Quality Management System evolved. Increased importance to off-line quality management for the design of robust manufacturing processes and products, services. This is time of growth of process optimization.

2000+: Evolution of of integrated management system approach. Statistical process control. Synchronization of management system frameworks.

WHAT IS QUALITY ASSURANCE?

Quality assurance is the process of verifying or determining whether products or services meet or exceed customer expectations.

Quality assurance is a process-driven approach with specific steps to help define and attain goals. This process considers design, development, production, and service.

The most popular tool used to determine quality assurance is the Shewhart Cycle, developed by Dr. W. Edwards Deming. This cycle for quality assurance consists of four steps: Plan, Do, Check, and Act. These steps are commonly abbreviated as PDCA.

The four quality assurance steps within the PDCA model stand for:

• Plan: Establish objectives and processes required to deliver the desired results.
• Do: Implement the process developed.
• Check: Monitor and evaluate the implemented process by testing the results against the predetermined objectives
• Act: Apply actions necessary for improvement if the results require changes.

QA System Components

Quality Assurance (QA) is a way for your organization to make sure that it is always delivering the best it can to its service users, members, volunteers and any stake holders.

A QA system is a way of checking, through continuous monitoring and evaluation of your performance and through the collection of evidence, that your organization is continuously improving what it does and how it does it.

QA can also be a way of measuring what your organization does against other organizations doing similar work or against set, recognized standards.

This system of checking your organization’s quality is an ongoing process. The monitoring of what your organization does and how it does it is continuous to ensure that you are always meeting the new standards that are always developing

Understanding Product Quality Assurance

The term Product Quality Assurance has a very wide scope. Let us try to understand it. During the entire product life-cycle from concept to obsolescence there are different activities or stages.

It is important to assure the quality at each stage in order to meet the customer requirements consistently.

Given below are the product quality assurance activities at each stage of product life cycle.

Concept & Design Introduction

In this stage, the concept is developed and the product is designed and introduced into the market. Product quality assurance plays a critical role during this stage.

It decides the customer requirements and based on that decides the product requirements.

During the design stage, quality control evaluates and validates the product i.e. the quality control engineer will compare the product designed with respect to the product and customer requirements and confirm whether the design would meet them.

Once the product is validated, it is released for manufacturing. Quality control also has to make sure that the processes being used to manufacture and inspect the product are correct.

Companies need to develop and implement the standard inspection procedures, which quality control persons use to do periodic inspection of the products.

Production & Growth 

During this stage, the demand for a product increases and so the quantity of production increases.

At this stage, the role of quality control is to make sure that in the race to manufacture more, the organization does not compromises on quality. Therefore you need to implement processes for higher production targets.

Since during this stage the competition increases and the costs have to be kept low, various low cost alternatives are explored.

If you decide to outsource some processes involved in manufacturing the product then product quality control department ensures that the supplier processes are capable of delivering the quality products or services.

Market Saturation & Maturity

During the maturity stage, the competition further increases and this situation puts pressure on margins. Moreover, with various options available, the customers become more demanding.

Value for money is the theme. Role of quality control almost remains similar to the one during the growth stage.

Product Decline

During this stage, the alternate products start eating up the market share and hence sales start declining. Product quality control has a little role to play during this stage.

The most important role or process during this stage is planning for the obsolescence of the existing product.

Role Of Product Quality Audit in Quality Assurance System

Apart from these roles, some product quality control roles remain active throughout the life of the product.

Product quality audit is one such role wherein the quality control team does random audits of the products ready before dispatching to the customers.

This is a standard practice in order to keep a check on the entire process of procurement, production, and inspection.

Another such role is handling customer complaint. During the entire life of the product, there will be customer complaints because of some errors during the process or due to component quality or due to the misuse of the product.

The product quality control has to find out the root cause of the complaints and put processes in place to ensure that such occurrences do not get repeated.