Quality Assurance vs Quality Control – What Is The Difference?

Digital businesses must deliver exceptional customer experiences that ensure user retention, customer loyalty and a relentless revenue stream. While the stakes are high and businesses compete aggressively to achieve digital transformation, quality remains at the focal point. Quality assurance (QA) and quality control (QC) are two key aspects of product or service quality management. There is no denying of the fact that some quality assurance and quality control activities may be interrelated, but the two processes differ. When we compare quality assurance vs quality control, both processes may have similar intentions but take different approaches to ensure customers receive a high-quality product.

Quality Assurance vs Quality Control

Quality assurance:

Quality assurance is defined as a quality management initiative aiming to provide confidence that an application’s quality requirements will be fulfilled. Quality assurance is twofold—internally to the stakeholders and externally to the final users, regulatory authorities and third parties.

Quality control:

Quality control is defined as a quality management process aiming to fulfil an application’s quality requirements or service. While quality assurance deals with how processes are performed or an application is created, quality control can be termed as the ‘inspection’ aspect of quality management.

An overview of QA processes

QA involves activities and procedures performed during SDLC that help ensure a high-quality application release. QA includes members across departments discussing, planning and executing tests to validate product quality.

Ensures a high-quality product:

A business can’t simply release a product and hope for the best. QA helps digital organizations plan how they will approach product quality. QC helps ensure digital businesses that the finished product meets expectations. QC and QA play vital roles in delivering top-quality services and products to customers and securing revenue for the business.

Ensures adherence to policies and procedures:

While QA is more process-oriented than QC, both approaches follow standards set by the organisation for securing high quality. QC might involve some exploratory or UX testing that demands a certain level of creativity on the tester’s part. However, defect detection and remediation must still be recorded and executed systematically.

Mitigates major quality issues:

Defects may be in the form of minor inconveniences or highly escalated disruptions. The earlier such defects are identified, the more cost-effective and easier it is to fix the issue. The risk increases exponentially as defects move closer to the customers’ hands. QA and QC aim to achieve reduced time and cost to market for digital businesses. The former helps to establish processes for early detection, and the latter helps businesses fix as many errors as possible in the application.

Improves the organisation’s product development processes:

Feedback loops are a familiar idea for developers. Organisations adhering to QA and QC processes follow a continuous learning path and eventually become more efficient and effective with each product release. QC and QA enable digital businesses to understand where they may improve in critical areas of planning, automation, bug detection, etc., to enable a great CX.

Conclusion

Quality assurance is a combination of activities throughout the manufacturing process that ensures product quality. On the other hand, quality control is a set of procedures to ensure the product meets the quality requirements. Both are different from each other but, at the same time, essential when it comes to providing quality applications and services as they both lie at the core of quality management.