Quality Assurance

In today’s competitive market, the quality of a product or service plays a vital role in the firms’ development process. The standards and procedures defined by quality assurance can help the companies prevent product defects before they arise.

What is Quality Assurance?

Quality assurance (QA) is the act or process of confirming that a firm’s quality requirements are being met to ensure that the products and services the firm delivers are at the required quality level. Managing the quality of production involves planning, fulfilling, and monitoring activities. Quality assurance is the monitoring facet of that discipline.

The term “quality assurance” is sometimes used interchangeably with “quality control,” another facet of the management process. However, quality control pertains to the actual fulfilment of whatever quality requirements have been put in place. Quality assurance is checking in on quality control methods to ensure they’re working as planned.

Importance of Quality Assurance

The importance of properly established and managed quality assurance system for the achievement of company business objectives cannot be ignored. They serve as a passport to success by assisting the company to achieve high-quality processes, procedures, systems, and people, with eventual high-quality products and services and enhancement of the following:

Customer satisfaction, and therefore, customer loyalty and repeat business and referral.
Timely registration of products and services by eliminating waste and the need for rework.
Operational results such as revenue, profitability, market share and export opportunities.
Alignment of processes with achievement of better results.
Understanding and motivation of employees toward the company quality policy and business objectives, as well as participation in continual quality improvement initiatives.
Confidence of interested parties in the effectiveness and efficiency of the Company as demonstrated by the financial and social gains from company performance and reputation.

What does Quality Assurance involve?

The quality assurance process involves four key phases:

Developing a quality assurance plan
Audit project quality
Analyze
Review project

1. Developing a quality assurance plan

The first phase of the QA process involves planning the overall strategy for assuring quality. The fundamental steps in creating a QA plan are sequential and start with setting up goals of product assurance as to why the product would need quality assurance.

The next step involves assigning responsibilities to the members of the quality team and collecting relevant product standard information to define compliance criteria.

Identify a set of metrics and measurements to use to gauge the quality levels.

2.Audit

A quality audit is a formal review of product ongoing status to see whether these activities executed in line with business processes and tactical decisions. The goal of conducting a product audit is to show missing policies, procedures, or techniques that reduce quality levels and increase project failure probability. Under a quality audit, you can review metrics like defect frequency, failure rate, budget variation, and gauge project activities under the quality baseline.

Finally, quality assurance audit activity generates formal documentation of required changes to the execution process and acts as a base for formulating corrective actions.

3. Analyse project quality

Quality analysis is a combination of steps to inspect and review a specific project activity and identifies what would improve the activity’s value. The goal of project quality analysis is to check quality levels and implement actions that are necessary to achieve improvements in the current quality management framework.

4. Review Project Activities

After executing the quality audit and analysis, the next step would be to introduce the recommended changes in project processes through a project review process. And, this will complete the quality assurance process cycle.

Companies must follow effective quality assurance processes to reduce errors in the final product.

Advantages and Disadvantages of Quality Assurance

The quality of a product is a crucial competitive differentiator. Quality assurance helps you ensure that you create products that are defect-free and meet the expectations of customers.

Advantages of Quality Assurance

QA saves money – It leads to cost reductions stemming from the prevention of product defects.
Prevents from unforeseen emergencies – With corporate software, the stakes are even higher, and the bugs can lead to system blackouts, missing data, and communication breakdowns. With QA, there is no margin for errors.
Promotes the Organization’s productivity and efficiency – While development and testing performed in parallel can fix defects in the early stages.
Boosts customer satisfaction – Regular client involvement in software development and testing increases the customer satisfaction that software quality developed as per the requirements.
Improves Client Confidence – Proper quality checks at various levels of software like a review, inspection, and more with the involvement of both internal and external stakeholders will increase the client’s confidence in the submission of weekly reports of the defect. Requirement metrics also help in assuring the client’s work gets done on time.

Disadvantages of Quality Assurance

Time-consuming – Executing each action in QA will be time-consuming and leads to wastage of time in documentation and meetings rather than working on actual software development and testing sometimes.
High cost – Through QA, though the cost of fixing bugs in later stages of the software will be reduced, for the small projects with the low budget, it’s difficult to quality assurance as the number of resources increases in the project so does the cost of a project. For small projects, hiring the whole team of QA and implementing SQA causes a drastic increase in the price of a project.
Challenging to implement sometimes – As quality assurance defines all the activities and actions that should be taken at each step of software development in a very detailed manner, sometimes it becomes difficult to implement every single process in development.

Conclusion

Businesses adopting quality assurance can enjoy many advantages and become more competitive in the market. ISO certification is the most superior quality assurance standard and recommended to adopt for any business in any industry.

In the future, the market size for quality assurance is expected to grow even more across the companies, and this creates a massive demand for Quality Assurance professionals. This is why at Finstock Evarsity College we offer a free short course on Basics in Quality Assurance, click on the link below to get more information.

https://finstockevarsity.com/programs/college/short-courses/free-courses/frqa/

At Finstock Evarsity College we also offer more free and premium business related courses. They are online classes that can accessed at the comfort of your home. This lessons are very instrumental as they are state of art content, visual aids and numerous practice papers. Certificate are instant download on completion of the course(s). For more information on how to boost your counselling skills click on the link(s) provided.

https://finstockevarsity.com/programs/college/schools/diploma/dpm/