Understanding quality assurance vs quality control helps your team meet quality standards and keeps the workflow transparent for all participants. With a clear line between QA and QC, team members know which activities belong to them, and clients can take part in the quality management process.
Why QA and QC Matter: The Importance of Quality Requirements
QA and QC play a key role in the software development lifecycle. When you combine quality control and quality assurance activities, your business gets these benefits:
- Increased ROI: Fixing software defects is a complex and costly process. The later the team finds a defect, the more resources the fix needs. Early prevention and early detection reduce costs, increase return on investment and keep operations efficient.
- Enhanced Customer Satisfaction: The software market is highly competitive. To gain the trust of your target audience and reach the expected revenue, you need a final product that meets user expectations and gives users a good experience.
- Product Quality and Brand Reputation: A release of poor quality can cost you users for good. A high-quality product improves your reputation and brings users back to your solutions.
- Reduced Time to Market: User demands change fast, and a product released sooner stays relevant longer. Fewer defects mean less time spent on fixes, so product quality has a direct effect on your release date.
Now that you know why quality management matters, you can explore the difference between QA and QC in detail.
What Is QA and QC? The QA/QC Meaning
QA and QC are parts of a quality management system. Some teams write the terms together as QA/QC or QC QA. The QA/QC meaning covers two activities with a shared goal: QA builds a process that prevents defects, and QC checks the product to find them. That goal is where the QA/QC difference starts.
What Is Quality Assurance (QA)?
What is QA? QA is a series of activities during the development and manufacturing process that ensure the product meets defined software quality standards and regulatory requirements.
These activities are part of the organization’s quality management system and confirm that the product is ready for market release.
Quality assurance focuses on the process of creating digital solutions. It confirms that the technologies and practices the team uses lead to the main goal: a digital product that meets the needs of end users and the expectations of the client.
Effective QA relies on clear standard operating procedures (SOPs) and a documented quality management plan.
What Is Quality Control (QC)? Quality Control Testing
What is QC? QC is a set of methods that check the product against quality parameters after the production process. These methods identify potential defects in the software solution so the team can fix them.
Quality control testing requires full testing of each application. When testers find defects, they report them to the project manager, who decides whether the product goes to the market or returns to the team.
Quality Assurance vs Quality Control: Key Differences
What is the difference between QC and QA? To show quality assurance vs quality control examples, we compare the processes by these parameters:
→ Approach to quality management
→ Focus area of QA/QC
→ Actions needed to achieve the desired result
→ Timing of activities
→ Responsible parties
Let’s take a closer look at each point ⬇️
QA vs QC: Approach to Quality Management
Quality management combines quality assurance (QA) and quality control (QC) processes to deliver products that meet customer expectations.
Quality control vs quality assurance:
Quality assurance takes a proactive approach. QA activities start early in the software development life cycle and aim to prevent defects.
Quality control takes a reactive approach. It identifies actual errors so the team can fix them. The main QC and QA difference in approach is prevention against detection. Both make your quality management system and your operations more efficient.
Focus Area: Quality Control vs Quality Assurance
In QA vs QC in software testing, quality assurance focuses on process design and the production processes the team needs to reach the goal. It includes activities that prevent errors.
Quality control focuses on the final product. Its task is to identify defects that already exist and may affect customer satisfaction. In other words, QC fixes errors after they appear. This is the QC and QA difference in focus: QA looks at the process, and QC looks at the product. Both processes need collaboration with project management and alignment with QMS documentation.
QA and QC Activities in the Testing Process
QA vs QC: quality assurance activities take different forms within the testing process and follow the testing strategy. The examples below support the overall QA strategy and include quality control testing at the execution and release stages:
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Focus of the testing process Requirement Analysis: review functional and non-functional product requirements and check that they are complete and realistic.
- Test Planning: build a testing strategy that fits the features and complexity of the project.
- Test Design: create test cases that cover all quality requirements.
- User Interface (UI) Testing: confirm that UI components, such as buttons and labels, work as the requirements describe.
- Exploratory Testing: an approach where testers explore the app with personal freedom and responsibility. It differs from scripted testing, where testers follow predefined steps.
- Regression Testing: manual regression takes a lot of time, so you can pick repetitive test cases for automation. Automated tests run faster and more often. Add automation to the continuous integration (CI) pipeline to speed delivery.
- Test Execution & Defect Reporting: the team runs the test cases and logs defects in a bug tracker, a test management system or another electronic quality management system. Test automation tools run tests and generate reports automatically.
- Improvements: bug fixes, test documentation upkeep and other process improvements that prevent defects.
- Release Stage: when a new version is ready for release, the testing team runs smoke tests to confirm the release candidate is stable and free of critical issues. Then the team runs test suites to verify the new functionality and issues a test result report.
Timing of QA and QC Activities
Quality assurance runs across the entire SDLC and the whole development process of the digital solution. Specialists pay attention to QA activities at every stage to prevent problems and keep product quality at the right level.
Quality control has a narrower scope. It starts at the final stage of the production cycle, when the software product is ready for testing. This timing is another QC vs QA difference: QA works from the start, and QC works at the end of the cycle.
Who Is Responsible for QA and QC
The development process gives specialists distinct roles in QA and QC.
In the QA process, the following roles may participate:
- QA Manager or QA Lead: leads the implementation of quality assurance strategies on the project, plans testing, manages the QA team and organizes work with other departments to keep the development process consistent.
- QA Engineers or QA Analysts: develop test plans and write test cases and scenarios. They also implement QA processes, maintain test documentation and improve processes to reach the set goals.
- Test Automation Engineers: automate repetitive tasks to increase productivity. They write scripts, configure tools and make sure the automation results match the QA strategy.
- Business Analysts (BA): gather and document product requirements. The quality of their work decides whether QA engineers can write test cases that meet business needs. The BA also connects the client with the development and QA teams.
- Project Manager or Product Owner: makes sure the digital solution meets the required standards across the software development lifecycle and prioritizes features by their impact on the quality of the final product.
In quality control testing, the following roles participate:
- Manual and Automation Testers: run automated test cases and manual tests on the project. They document every software defect they find and report it to the development team and the project manager.
- Test Engineers: configure the test environment, build complex test sets for system or integration testing and work with developers on the reliability and performance of the product.
- DevOps Engineers: provide the infrastructure for performance and load testing, including stress tests, and keep CI/CD pipelines working.
- Release Managers: control the final stage of the SDLC before the release. They also handle quality management after the release and fix the errors that appear in this period.
Some specialists take part in both QA and QC. Software developers, together with QA engineers, can write and run test cases, for example unit tests, and act as testers.
Scrum Masters also work across both processes. They keep communication clear between the QA and QC teams, developers, clients and other stakeholders.
To show the difference between QA and QC at a glance, we have prepared a comparison table. It shows the QA and QC difference for every parameter.
| Parameter for comparison | Quality Assurance | Quality Control |
| Approach | Proactive process | Reactive process |
| Focus Area | Process | Product |
| Type of Activities | Actions aimed at preventing defects | Activities for identifying existing errors |
| Timing of Execution | Throughout the entire SDLC | Upon completion of a specific development cycle or before the final release |
| Process Participants | QA team (QA Manager, QA Engineers, Test Automation Engineers, BA, Project Manager) | QC team (Testers, Test Engineers, DevOps Engineers, Release Managers) |
| Objectives | Ensure the correctness of actions by the entire team in achieving set goals | Check if the team’s results meet expectations |
| Impact on End Quality | Contributes to achieving the desired quality outcomes | Checks product work results against quality standards |
Despite the clear differences between quality assurance and quality control, you cannot view these concepts in isolation. They are two equally important parts of a quality management system, and you need both to build quality products and deliver customer satisfaction.
Some similarities between QA and QC support this view. The next section covers them.
Similarities Between QA and QC
When you compare quality assurance vs quality control, you can find shared features along with the differences. Here are some of them:
- Adherence to Standards. Both processes follow specific quality standards that the final product must meet. The difference lies in the approach to this goal, as described above.
- Focus on a High-Quality Product. QA and QC activities share a common objective: high quality in digital solutions. Both processes improve the customer experience and help the company keep its market position.
- Prevention of Critical Mistakes. Quality assurance identifies errors in the early stages of the SDLC and reduces the cost of fixes. Quality control removes problems after the digital solution reaches the market, because bugs that end users discover cost the company extra expenses and reputation.
- Continuous Improvement. Both processes show areas for improvement, such as requirements gathering and test documentation. As a result, your team can make its processes more efficient and reach better outcomes.
QC vs QA: Which Does Your Team Need?
Quality assurance and quality control are both critical parts of a quality management system in software development. The QC vs QA question has a clear answer: your team needs both. In the quality control vs quality assurance comparison, QA prevents defects and QC finds the defects that get through.
When the QA and QC difference is clear to every team member, each process does its job. Together, QA and QC give users a better experience and help you outpace competitors with high-quality releases.
