It is important for an organization to agree on the meaning of Quality Assurance (QA) and QualityControl(QC). Both form an integral part of the organization’s quality management plan, and the effectiveness of the delivery teams relies on the differences being completely understood by all stakeholders, including management.
Effective quality systems can contribute enormously to the success of projects, but the counterpoint is that, when poorly understood, the quality systems are likely to be weak and ineffective in ensuring that the delivered system is delivered on time, built by the team within their allocated budget, and satisfies the customer’s requirements.
This article considers the difference between Quality Assurance and Quality Control. The concepts are investigated by looking at guidance from key industry players.
How many times has it struck you that many practitioners involved in the ICT field lack an understanding of the difference between Quality Assurance and Quality Control? Often you will hear someone talk about ‘QA’, when what they actually mean is ‘QC’.
This ambiguity consistently brings up problems and is a sure way of undermining a project. Projects are negatively affected as it tends to lead to strained conversations and makes reaching consensus a difficult task.
Although QA and QC are closely related concepts, and are both aspects of quality management, they are fundamentally different in their focus:
- QC is used to verify the quality of the output;
- QA is the process of managing for quality.
Achieving success in a project requires both QA and QC. If we only apply QA, then we have a set of processes that can be applied to ensure great quality in our delivered solution, but the delivered solution itself is never actually quality-checked.
Likewise, if we only focus on QC then we are simply conducting tests without any clear vision for making our tests repeatable, for understanding and eliminating problems in testing, and for generally driving improvement into the means we use to deliver our ICT solutions.
In either case, the delivered solution is unlikely to meet the customer expectation or satisfy the business needs that gave rise to the project in the first place.
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