Thinking the terms ‘quality control’ and ‘quality assurance’ can be used interchangeably is a common mistake.
Whoever coined those terms did nothing to clarify their differences, but in fact:
- Quality control (QC) makes sure that your product isn’t riddled with bugs.
- Quality assurance (QA) makes sure engineers are following processes to reduce future bugs, and write code more efficiently.
Quality control is something development teams do every day. They squash bugs in the code they wrote, and run tests to catch future errors.
Quality assurance is the overall management of development processes that make sure less testing and QC needs to be done.
At Process Street, we’ve already looked at the wider implications of QC and how to run tests on your software. We’ve even provided you with a bunch of pre-made software development processes you can adjust to your own team.
In this article, I’ll go into an explanation of quality assurance in software teams, and how you can use this information for your own developers.