Quality Assurance

Quality management is focused not simply on product quality, but also the means to achieve it.  Quality management has four components:

• Quality Assurance

• Quality Control

• Quality Improvement

• Project Management

Quality assurance is a system of procedures carried out to ensure that a production system (manufacturing or service sectors) is accountable to established standards.  It is an audit function of auditing the auditors: quality assurance engineers audit the work of quality control analysts.

Quality control consists of analyzing requirements documents and comparing product or service functionality to the client’s specified requirements.  To do so, quality control analysts devise test cases to confirm or reject the performance of each and every requirement and thereby ascertain whether the product or service is adequate for delivery to the client in good faith.

While quality control is an audit of functionality, quality assurance is an audit of processes used to achieve quality control.

Using software development as an example, quality control is a process of measuring the quality of software engineering products. It does this by means of tests of the software system. These tests can be unit tests, integration tests, or system tests.  Quality assurance is the design and audit of the implementation of this process.

Quality improvement arises from the quality control process.  Where quality control analysts identify functionality failures, the failures are logged and categorized.  Where unacceptable frequencies of failure are observed, process engineers are called in to modify the production or delivery process for that product or service.

Project management is essential to quality improvement.  Business, manufacturing and service delivery processes cannot be altered and improved in the absence of rigorous project management to ensure accountability and avoid disruption of the enterprise.

Baker, Jake & Powell associates are skilled at delivering the following quality-related functions and conveying to your staff the knowledge necessary to maintain these systems internally.

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