Defining Quality Control and Quality Assurance

Quality Assurance and Quality Control are often seen as loathsome corporate entities, assigning blame, slowing down the production process with excessive control measures, and creating tons of “useless” documentation. This perception is unfortunately the result of years of bad corporate QA and QC implementation, where upper management groups impose policy (without process user input) to define adequate “Controls”, untrained or unqualified personnel leading QA and QC activities, and  poor communication about vision and goals. It is far too common for companies to approach QA and QC the wrong way, thereby spoiling their staff on the concept and limiting the benefits that can be gained not only for customers, but for internal quality of work environment. To effectively implement QA and QC, you must first properly define “Quality” and then the role that each (QA and QC) play in achieving quality.  There are two general views of Quality:

• The Customer view of Quality: Is the external view that means that the product or service they receive satisfies their needs
• The Producer view of Quality: Is the internal view that is based on whether or not a product satisfies the stated requirements

Quality Control QC focuses on the product produced. This focus is two-fold, ensuring that both customer and producer share the same vision of quality, and that work is objectively reviewed to eliminate defects.

Unfortunately the two views of quality (customer and producer) are not always in sync; therefore QC’s first goal is to reduce the “Quality Gap”, the gap between customer expectations (not necessarily stated) and the development team’s understanding of the explicit requirements. By minimizing the quality gap, QC ensures an end product that matches the customer’s needs and expectations.

The second goal of the Quality Control entity is to find defects before they reach the customer. This effort maximizes customer satisfaction when the product or service is delivered. In a perfect world, every requirement analyst and developer would objectively check their work and communicate efficiently, both with the customer and with each other. They would therefore produce a perfect product for the customer the first time. Real world experience shows that self-checks are insufficient tools for discovering and rectifying errors and that breakdowns in communication occur in even the most in-tune organizations. As a result, Quality Control serves as an objective 3rd party entity to execute the proper checks at each critical point of the development process, thereby providing sufficient feedback to the producer (Analyst, Developer, etc.) to correct defects and avoid a cascading effect of negative consequences. In a word, Quality Control is the second look, the “spellchecker,” that helps to ensure that work is on the right track from the start through the finish.

Quality Assurance QA focuses on processes and their continuous improvement. Its goal is to reduce variance in processes in order to predict the quality of an output (final or interim product), gather best practices for the company, reduce cost, and reduce time to market. QA is strongly linked to innovation and creativity. Quality Assurance neither imposes nor defines processes for other people, but it provides advice and support to the process owner, which leads to the ability to measure success and make decisions based on facts. A well-known approach to Quality Assurance is the PDCA (Plan Do Check Act) Cycle:

1. Plan: Define the mission, vision, and goals to be achieved by an activity or a process. Identify the procedures, methods, and tools needed to achieve the goals. Define the measures to be used to check the results of the process.
2. Do: Execute the plan, train users to methods, deploy products, and use tools to perform scheduled tasks.
3. Check: Evaluate whether or not the goal has been achieved by using measures, metrics, and facts.
4. Act: When gaps are defined, identify the origin of the problem and define an approach to correct or close the gap (Return to the Plan phase).

In conclusion, neither QA nor QC focus on people, as they do not care “whose fault it is” (although they do care when there is something valuable to be remembered!). The goal of a good QA and QC implementation, in any organization, is to make things better. It requires good communication between the QA/QC groups and process owners. It also requires QA/QC lead(s) to communicate and explain why, when, how, and what is being done. Key attributes for success of QA/QC implementation are:

• Participation: Both process owners and users need to provide their expert input on how things “should” work, and define it. QA should be a support function for process related questions.
• Transparency: Open communication and the ability to look at all aspects of the process are critical to fully understand and identify both what works and what doesn’t
• Clear Goals: The entire team should not only know how QA/QC is implemented, but also the intended results