Quality Assurance (QA) is the process of ensuring that your products or services meet the quality standards of your organization or industry. It is also a mechanism for a company to improve the quality of what it offers to its customers and partners.
This area is responsible for defining and maintaining the requirements to manufacture or develop reliable products. The main reasons for having a robust quality assurance area are to increase customer confidence and the credibility of your organization.
At the same time, a competent QA area allows you to improve your work processes and have more efficiency in your operations. Ultimately, Quality Assurance serves to make your company more competitive.
Stay with us and read about what Quality Assurance is, the tasks of a professional in the area, and the difference between Quality Assurance (QA) and Quality Control (QC).
Importance of Quality Assurance (QA)
The Quality Assurance area has immense value within companies, affecting everything from risk mitigation to customer satisfaction. It helps improve your brand’s reputation, ensure compliance, and discover weaknesses in your processes.
Below are the main reasons to invest in QA:
- Meet (or exceed) customer demands. Quality Assurance ensures that your products or services will consistently meet or even exceed your customers’ expectations. This is because it allows you to set clear quality objectives, implement control measures, and define criteria to be met for process improvement.
- Ensure compliance. This is especially useful for organizations operating in highly regulated industries. After all, the QA area allows you to monitor and evaluate procedures to ensure compliance with relevant legislation and standards.
- Discover weaknesses. The testing process allows you to discover weaknesses in your organization. It is possible to find problems in your product or services, identifying areas for improvement.
- Standardize processes. Part of the Quality Assurance work is to define criteria and determine quality objectives. This facilitates the standardization of processes, in turn simplifying training, onboarding, and knowledge transfer.
- Save on maintenance. Your QA team helps reduce your maintenance costs by testing failures before they become headaches. For software companies, for example, it is possible to detect bugs before they reach consumers, avoiding the costs of developing patches and distributing them across your base.
- Speed up market entry. Good QA will allow you to know when your product is ready to go to market. After all, the process involves testing all the functionalities of your product, ensuring it is ready for launch more quickly.
- Improve your brand’s reputation. By delivering high-quality products or services, your organization will appear reliable and customer-focused. This tends to increase consumer loyalty and even make them advocates for your brand.
- Increase operational efficiency. The QA philosophy promotes consistency, reliability, and efficiency in organizational processes. This leads to less waste and greater productivity.
- Ensure supplier quality. It is common for companies to rely on suppliers for access to critical components or services. By implementing supplier quality processes, your company can ensure they meet your quality requirements.
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What does a Quality Assurance (QA) professional do
As you might imagine, a Quality Assurance professional is responsible for ensuring that quality standards are met in a specific area—or even the entire organization. This person must ensure that the product or service meets customer expectations and complies with relevant legislation.
Generally, QA work is divided into five functions: planning, testing, monitoring, reporting, and improvement. Let’s talk about each of them below.
1. Planning
The first phase where you will want to involve a Quality Assurance specialist is in planning. This professional needs to be present in the planning phase of a product or service.
The person will be responsible for defining quality objectives, measurement criteria, and methods to achieve them. They will also need to review documents with requirements, specifications, and design—ensuring they are clear, consistent, and testable.
The QA specialist should collaborate with developers, project managers, and other stakeholders to define the scope and schedule of Quality Assurance activities.
2. Testing
Perhaps the part most associated with QA work is testing the product. It is necessary to ensure that it meets the requirements of functionality, usability, performance, security, and compatibility.
Depending on the area where you work, different tools and techniques will be used to create, execute, and automate these tests. The Quality Assurance specialist is also responsible for verifying and validating the results as well as identifying and reporting defects found.
Finally, it is this person’s task to verify and validate the results. They must identify and report defects, as well as track and manage the resolution of issues.
3. Monitoring
The next step is to monitor the quality of the product or service throughout its lifecycle. This means that the QA professional is there during development and implementation, as well as during maintenance.
Use appropriate metrics and indicators to measure the quality of the delivered product. Think of measurements like defect density, test coverage, customer satisfaction, and quality cost.
Another function of the Quality Assurance specialist is to collect and evaluate feedback from customers and other stakeholders. From this, they can identify and prioritize areas for improvement.
4. Reporting
It may seem like a boring part of the job, but creating reports is important for other departments to know about the problems found. Therefore, the QA professional needs to communicate and document the progress of improvements in products or services to all relevant people.
For this, reports, dashboards, and charts should be created to summarize the recent activities and findings of the Quality Assurance sector. These items should include recommendations and suggestions for quality improvements.
Finally, the QA specialist should participate in evaluations, audits, and inspections. This makes it easier to ensure that defined quality standards and processes are being followed.
5. Improvement
We have reached the ultimate goal of all QA work: ensuring the improvement of the product or service your company offers. To achieve this, the professional must conduct research and apply best practices, methodologies, and frameworks to ensure project quality.
This includes using tools such as ISO certifications, the Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI), Agile, and Lean. It is also necessary to stay updated with the skills and knowledge required to use the latest technologies and tools.
The main function of Quality Assurance is to improve the quality system through constant data monitoring. The information varies according to the company’s needs. Using data analysis and visualization tools, the QA team proposes corrective and preventive actions, ensuring continuous monitoring.
Difference between Quality Assurance and Quality Control
Many people confuse Quality Assurance with Quality Control, but these are distinct activities in practice. Each has its specific focus and objectives.
Do you know the difference between them? That’s what we will discuss in this section.
Definition
Both Quality Assurance (QA) and Quality Control (QC) are essential to ensure excellence in processes and products.
However, Quality Assurance focuses on activities that ensure the quality of development processes. Quality Control, on the other hand, focuses on product quality.
Focus
Quality Assurance seeks to prevent defects during manufacturing through a proactive approach. QC identifies and corrects defects after production, being a reactive action.
The goal of QA is to improve and test processes to avoid problems before the product is finalized. QC aims to detect defects after manufacturing but before market release.
How It Is Done
QA is implemented with a quality management system and periodic audits. QC uses tools and equipment to eliminate failures and ensure customer expectations are met.
While Quality Assurance focuses on problem prevention, Quality Control acts on maintaining product quality.
Read more: Quality management plan: what it is, how to create it and its benefits
Responsibilities
All members of development teams are responsible for Quality Assurance. In Quality Control, a specific team tests the products to find defects.
QA involves continuous process verification, while QC applies validation and product testing, such as software. Statistical tools are used in both processes: in QA, we have Statistical Process Control (SPC). In QC, there is Statistical Quality Control (SQC).
Type of Tool and Methodology
QA is a management tool, while QC is a corrective action. Quality Assurance focuses on the process, while Quality Control focuses on the product.
Among the main methodologies used for both are ISO, Lean, Kaizen, DMAIC, cGMP, Six Sigma, and 8 Disciplines. These practices ensure quality at every stage of production.
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How to Apply QA in Your Company
Now you know the importance of Quality Assurance and its difference from Quality Control. But a thought might be crossing your mind: “How can I implement this in my organization?”
If that’s the case, don’t worry: this section will tell you everything you need to know to apply Quality Assurance in your company.
1. Evaluate Requirements
The first step, of course, is to hire a QA professional and set up a Quality Assurance area in your company. After doing this, your team should analyze and define the requirements for your product to be considered functional or non-functional.
Remember that it is much more expensive to solve a problem after your product has already been launched. The cheaper option is to detect it already in the design phase, and these requirements will help you with that.
The QA team will work much better if they have consistent, comprehensive, and traceable requirements. Only then can they create customized tests tailored to your product or service.
2. Plan Tests
With the information obtained during the requirements analysis phase, it’s time to plan your Quality Assurance team’s tests. Develop a testing plan that includes a product evaluation strategy, the scope of the tests, the budget, and the deadlines.
Detail the types and levels of testing that will be required. Discuss the methods used for the tests and the tools to find non-conformities.
3. Design Tests
Your QA team should create inspection scenarios and checklists that will address the requirements to ensure the good quality of your product. Each individual evaluation should include conditions, data, and steps to validate each functionality.
The briefing should clearly state the expected test result so that the analyst responsible can interpret the results they find. It is recommended to start with exploratory tests to familiarize yourself with the product.
4. Execute Tests and Report Defects
Tests begin at the initial level, with the production team performing unit checks of components. Then, the Quality Assurance team performs tests at the functional and interface levels.
Manual testing follows previously established procedures. All detected defects are recorded in a tracking system for efficient non-conformity management.
Use test observability tools that offer detailed reports, precise debugging, and intermittent failure detection — all in a simple and intuitive dashboard. Track each stage of the tests with access to all records.
Once defects are identified, recorded, and corrected, the quality assurance team tests the components again to ensure no failures remain. Additionally, they perform regression tests to verify that the corrections have not affected other functions or characteristics of the product.
5. Execute Release Tests
At some point in the process, developers or designers will issue a release notification detailing a list of implemented features, corrected defects, recurring issues, and limitations. This is when the QA team should identify the functionalities affected by these changes.
Then, they should develop modified test plans that address the scope of the new product version. The Quality Assurance team should also perform initial tests to ensure each version is stable. If the test is approved, the modified testing plans are executed, and a report is generated.
Read more: Quality agreements in the pharmaceutical industry: how can companies improve management?
Conclusion
In a world where the quality of products and services is a competitive differentiator, implementing an effective Quality Assurance (QA) system becomes essential for any organization. Quality Assurance is not just a department or a stage in the process, but a philosophy that should permeate the entire organizational culture.
By adopting QA practices, companies meet and exceed customer expectations, strengthening their reputation and loyalty. With process standardization and early identification of failures, the organization saves resources and becomes more agile in bringing products to market.
Finally, by investing in Quality Assurance, your organization not only ensures compliance with standards and regulations but also creates an environment of continuous improvement, prepares for future challenges, and secures its market leadership position. Understanding and correctly applying QA principles will undoubtedly put you on the right path to excellence.
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