What is Quality Assurance vs Quality Control? 5 key differences
Integrate your quality management processes with a configurable mobile solution, and aggregate everything in a single, unified system. You’ll be able to leverage data from both QC inspections and QA audits with ease, providing faster response times and more meaningful improvements to your process. However, the audit would play no part in accepting or rejecting that product, and it would instead be used to evaluate the process and controls involved. It’s best to think of quality control as “under the jurisdiction” of quality assurance.
QA establishes policies for early detection, and the QC seeks to catch and fix as many bugs as possible in a developed product. It aims to set a framework for minimizing issues and preventing defects before they arise through process design. This approach is a QC process involving inspecting and assessing all product parts.
Process vs product
That means checking product development or project outcomes to meet the previously defined quality standards. QC is a reactive process that responds to problems and aims to detect errors, such as software defects, glitches, or imperfections. This helps ensure you are producing a high-quality product before it reaches consumers. Organizations typically have a systematic approach to QCing products. Quality assurance is a broad concept in the life sciences industry. QA encompasses all of the activities within your quality management plan that ensure your product is ready to go through the manufacturing process.

We provide free technical articles and tutorials that will help you to get updated in industry. First, recall that QA and QC should not Quality assurance vs. Quality control be used interchangeably. The same goes for quality audits and inspections, a difference which we covered in the previous section.
What Are Software Quality Factors?
Learn about quality management in the information systems industry with The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology's Information Systems Auditing, Controls, and Assurance course. Rutgers has a course geared toward working in the health care industry, Quality Improvement in Healthcare Organizations. You can also get started on your MBA through degree programs on Coursera. The BLS also reports that the median annual wage for software developers, quality assurance analysts, and testers is $109,020 The job outlook is expected to grow 25 percent from 2021 to 2031 [2].
- Both Quality Assurance (QA) and Quality Control (QC) are terms many people use interchangeably.
- Quality control (QC) is a product-oriented approach to quality to ensure that products or services meet specified quality requirements and standards.
- QA helps guide the development of the product so that when it reaches a smaller QC team those individuals will be able to perform their tests with the allotted amount of resources and time.
- They’re designed to save time while managing your quality and project development.
- This cost is regardless of whether you invest in your own QA and QC teams or enlist the help of a testing partner.
- QA is process-oriented, and it primarily focuses on processes and procedures for improving quality and preventing quality defects before they occur.
Also, these activities are therefore performed by the entire team. They represent an organization-wide effort whereby each team member must follow the defined SOPs (standard operating procedures). Its purpose is to react to the developed product by identifying and either fixing or triaging remaining defects.
What are the differences between quality assurance and quality control?
It is beneficial to have experience and knowledge of Minitab, which is a statistical software used in quality management is beneficial. This software discovers and predicts patterns, uncovers hidden relationships between variables, and creates visualizations, which can help make processes more efficient. Another difference between QA and QC is that QA is proactive, while QC is reactive to any glitches or problems found. QA focuses on the processes during development, and QC is more about the product. Lastly, QA is an organization-wide responsibility, while smaller teams handle QC work testing the product.

QAs check whether your project meets the business requirements and look for any hidden bugs and errors to prevent them. To launch a successful product, it is extremely important to know about the QA and QC. In Codica, our quality assurance engineers and testers actively use these methods during and after the software development. In this article, you can learn more about QA and QC, how they differ, and how to use them for your business.
Differences Between Quality Assurance and Quality Control
Your business can improve its processes with each iteration to become more efficient. Digital quality savings can cost your business more in the long run. This cost is regardless of whether you invest in your own QA and QC teams or enlist https://www.globalcloudteam.com/ the help of a testing partner. It is important to invest in the staff and tools needed to ensure quality throughout the organization. It is worth noting that quality control has some methods for tracking inspections and issues.
In a bar graph-like structure, each bar within a histogram represents a group, while the bar height represents the data frequency. This diagram shows the connection between two variables by planning related data. The scatter diagram graphs pair numerical data with one variable on each axis to determine their relationship. The points will fall along the line or curve if the variables are correlated. Below you can see the integration of this time-tracking software with Trello. Moreover, our specialists customized seamless bundling with Trello to simplify the time-tracking process.
Continue to improve the organization’s processes
Unlike the definition Merriam-Webster’s dictionary provides, our version of quality doesn’t refer to “excellence.” Instead, it’s based on the expected needs of the customer. Inspection involves physically examining the deliverable for any defects to see if it matches the requirements. In statistical sampling, you select a random number of items from a batch and inspect them for defects and conformance issues. QC, meanwhile, involves measuring activities to verify the finished product before distribution. The key difference between QA and QC is that QA focuses on preventing defects and QC focuses on identifying weaknesses.
However, defect detection and remediation must still be recorded and executed in an organized method. Quality Assurance is popularly known as QA Testing, is defined as an activity to ensure that an organization is providing the best possible product or service to customers. Don’t manually tie QA forms and QC data together—it’s a waste of time and effort.
Keys to Quality Health and Wellness Experiences
It’s important to understand that, though both terms are aspects of one management system, they are still not synonymous. For most customers, when asked about the importance of these values, it usually comes down to quality. In this article, we would like to focus on the software quality and the way it is achieved and supported during the development process. Your overall goal as a quality management professional is to improve the organization’s work. You will have the opportunity to help it improve from good to great. The customers will be happier creating better products, and the organization will be more satisfied with their work.