Quality
assurance, or QA for short, is the activity of providing evidence needed to establish
Quality in work, and that activities that require good quality are being performed effectively. All those planned or systematic actions necessary to provide enough confidence that a product or service will satisfy the given
requirements for quality.
For products, quality assurance is a part and consistent pair of quality management offering supposedly fact-based external confidence to customers and other stakeholders that a product meets needs, expectations, and other requirements. QA claims to assure the existence and effectiveness of procedures that attempt to make sure - in advance - that the expected levels of quality will be reached. QA covers all activities from design, development, production, installation, servicing to documentation. It introduced the sayings "fit for purpose" and "do it right the first time". It
includes the regulation of the quality of raw materials, assemblies, products and components; services
related to production; and management, production, and inspection processes.
Quality assurance includes quality control, which comprises those quality assurance actions related to the physical characteristics of a material,
structure,
component, or system which provide a means to control the quality of the material, structure, component, or system to predetermined requirements.
One of the most widely used paradigms for QA management is the PDCA (Plan-Do-Check-Act) approach, also known as the Shewhart cycle.
More abstracts about the Quality Assurance