What is QA?

Quality assurance (QA) is a way of preventing mistakes and defects in products and avoiding problems when delivering products or services to customers. This defect prevention in quality assurance is often referred to as “shift left” since it focuses on quality earlier in the process.

Quality assurance is made up of activities implemented in a quality system so that requirements and goals for a product, service or activity will be fulfilled. It is the systematic measurement, comparison with a standard, monitoring of processes and an associated feedback loop that confers error prevention.

Quality assurance includes two principles: “Fit for purpose” (the product should be suitable for the intended purpose); and “right first time” (mistakes should be eliminated). QA includes management of the quality of raw materials, assemblies, products and components, services related to production, and management, production and inspection processes. The two principles also manifest before the background of developing (engineering) a novel technical product: The task of engineering is to make it work once, while the task of quality assurance is to make it work all the time.