To achieve a positive customer experience, it’s important to implement Quality Assurance (QA) practices. Many organizations understand this and try to meet customers’ specific requirements through QA. Still, many mistake Quality Assurance with Quality Control (QC) and Testing and end up confused.

To ensure effective customer service, it is important to have a good understanding of what Quality Assurance (QA), Quality Control (QC), and Testing actually are. In addition, while comparing QA to QC, try to recognize which one offers you a better result. While these three terms are often used interchangeably, they are very distinct processes.  

Quality Assurance

The role of Quality Assurance (QA) is to identify the processes necessary to check for defects and errors. The QA process verifies that products meet the client's standards and expectations. The QA process validates procedures and verifies processes to ensure they are correctly implemented for projects. It serves to:

• Create processes that find errors
• Focus on process
• Identify and remove defects

Quality Control

The role of Quality Control (QC) is to implement the processes developed during the QA process. QC begins after a project has been launched post proper QA testing and review. It serves to:

• Verify the client’s standards and requirements have been met
• Implement QA processes
• Carry out technical reviews, software testing, and code inspection

Testing

Testing is the planned process used to identify bugs, incomplete code, security issues, and the quality of the program written. The bugs found in testing are then documented and sent back to programming for revision. The focus of testing is to verify the software is working as expected. Mostly, software quality assurance and testing are done simultaneously to check if the software meets the usability requirements or not.

During the testing process, multiple scenarios are run to verify that expected inputs produce expected outputs. Further, incorrect data is plugged into the system to verify its appropriate rejection.

Overall QA, QC, and testing are required to ensure the successful launch of a product and its continued success. Changes in data are sometimes not reported, having a strong QC system assists in detecting issues. It is advisable to be overly cautious.