What is Quality Assurance? Definition, Methods, Benefits, & Roles

Quality has always been a key catalyst for success in all businesses. It’s the one constant that’s a bedrock for success stories, irrespective of a company’s business model, domain, size, or stature.

Quality assurance (QA) is the systematic way to assure your customers and stakeholders that your product or service is polished and has no issues. QA is present in every stage of the product development process to ensure that your product meets the required specifications and is developed with industry/company standards and guidelines.

The manufacturing sector was one of the first sectors that instilled QA into its operations. Owing to its success, since then, QA practices have become a norm in almost all industries and sectors worldwide.

The software industry has especially welcomed QA with open arms. The International Standardization of Organizations (ISO) 9000 family standards provide guidelines specific to quality management and quality assurance.

Quality assurance (QA) and quality control (QC) are often used or stated together. However, they are not the same and hold key differences between them. Here you go:

Here are the top QA methods that are generally used across industries to ensure quality:

Failure Testing

Failure testing in QA tests the limits of your product until it breaks. This is a very common and battle-tested method that is widely adopted and practiced in the manufacturing sector where a product is stress-tested under extreme conditions. Software companies use similar methods by stress-testing their products under variable user traffic and network conditions until the system starts experiencing failures.

Regular Audits and Inspections

Meticulous assessments through regular internal and external audits powered by ISO 9000 and 9001 certifications ensure that your company’s processes and products meet the required standards based on set guidelines.

Root Cause Analysis

Root cause analysis (RCA) involves studying the issues at hand and trying to get to the bottom of it with a systematic approach starting from the top level. RCA is a problem-solving approach to get to the root cause of the issue to resolve it. This also helps prevent similar issues from happening again.

Statistical Process Control (SPC)

Statistical process control is a mathematical process to pinpoint key issues in a software product, with an emphasis on forecasting and averting issues in the first place. By monitoring certain characteristics (using statistical charts, which are referred to as ‘control charts’) of the product functionality over a period of time, you're able to find any unusual patterns of concern. An added advantage is that some SPC tools can operate autonomously, without the need for human intervention.

Process and Product Quality Assurance (PPQA)

PPQA leverages gap analysis to ensure quality assurance for business processes and products within an organization. Gap analysis refers to assessing the difference between the current process/product state and the expected process/product state and analyzing it to verify whether or not the product requirements are met.

Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI)

CMMI is a framework/model that helps your organization enhance its capabilities in developing and maintaining quality products and services. It provides best practices for process improvement, covering areas beyond SQA, such as project management, system engineering, and more. By identifying strengths and weaknesses, CMMI guides your organization’s maturity level towards continuous improvement in various areas. Maturity in CMMI refers to your organization’s overall process expertise, not just individual team members’ skills.

Quality assurance has several benefits for users and product owners. Here are some of them:

Resolves Issues to Build Quality Products

QA delivers polished products to end users. Its main goal is to identify issues in your product and systematically resolve them. Since QA is a proactive process, it ensures that no issues are left unaccounted for throughout the development process.

Builds Trust and Enhances Brand Image

Your product quality speaks louder than anything. Modern-day consumers and users are well-informed and tech-forward. You cannot just launch a product and call it a day. Building a positive brand image through quality products is key to earning customer loyalty, strengthening trust, and honing long-term relationships. QA helps you do that.  

Lowers Risks and Costs

QA should never be an afterthought process. If ignored, it could backfire and lead to reworks, unhappy customers, additional costs, and lost time. Avoiding QA and offering a substandard product to your customers is bad for your business. Investing in QA for your product lowers risks and ultimately saves you time and money in the long run.

Ensures Standards and Compliance

Offering products that are developed with the set standards and compliance guidelines prevents a product from getting into legal trouble at all times. QA ensures that your product does not have such issues. Not abiding by the rules and regulations could lead to potential legal troubles, penalties, and damage to reputation. QA helps avoid such pitfalls.

Continuous Improvement

QA processes result in quality products. This helps to target areas of improvement in an organization’s processes and deliverables. The corrective measures help to continually improve company workflows leading to continuous improvement on all fronts.

Software quality assurance or SQA aims to find and fix defects or bugs using bug life cycles. SQA engineers ensure that your software meets the specified requirements and checks green on functional and non-functional aspects.

SQA is a very effective and crucial process to ensure that your software meets industry standards. It’s an integral part of the both software development lifecycle (SDLC) and the software testing lifecycle (STLC).

Related: STLC: Getting Started with Software Testing

Software teams utilize several methodologies for software development and testing. Let’s get a brief overview of the most important ones:

Waterfall Methodology

Waterfall methodology in the software industry utilizes linear steps or stages to develop and test software. It involves creating blueprints or plans from the requirement gathering stage to the release stage.

Waterfall has been in the software development scene for decades and is still utilized in numerous companies for product development and SQA testing processes. Its biggest downside is that it's a slow process.

Agile Methodology

Agile methodology is an iterative, flexible, highly adaptive, and efficient way to develop and test software. It excels in handling dynamic and complex software requirements. It is an iterative process for collaborative software development workflows involving cross-functional teams, managers, and stakeholders.

Read More: QA Best Practices in Agile

Other Popular Methodologies

Other popular methodologies for development and testing include Scrum, Kanban, and DevOps.

Scrum is a type of agile methodology that uses time-boxed iterative cycles to develop and test products. Kanban uses list boards to keep track of the software development processes. Lastly, DevOps uses multiple technologies and tools to fast-track workflows for the development, operations, and testing teams utilizing CI/CD pipelines.

QA processes are conducted by QA teams and require expert members for diverse areas. Here are some roles and responsibilities that you generally find in QA teams:

QA Analyst

QA analysts monitor production or development processes to ensure that the product meets established quality standards. They create and implement test processes, execute standard procedures to verify product specifications and rectify any issues during production.

QA Tester

QA testers aim to review system specifications and execute test scripts. They also identify and document technical issues, conduct post-release testing, and collaborate with cross-functional teams.

QA Engineer

QA engineers review quality specifications and technical design documents. They also develop comprehensive test plans and cases and execute both manual and automated tests to report and debug issues/bugs.

QA Manager

QA managers ensure and maintain overall product quality. They establish and maintain quality management and project tracking systems, plan and conduct internal quality audits, and ensure quality control procedures are implemented throughout production. They collaborate with various teams to ensure that the product adheres to legal requirements and oversee quality control at every stage.