Lean in Business
Quality Management ︎︎︎ Quality Assurance
What is Quality Assurance?
Quality assurance (QA) is a way to prevent non-conformities (defects and errors) in a product or service that will be delivered to a customer. ISO 9000 defines QA as "part of quality management focused on providing confidence that quality requirements will be fulfilled" (ISO 9000:2005, Clause 3.2.11).
Quality control (link the other page), quality assurance, quality planning and quality improvement are the four main components of Quality management (Rose, Kenneth H. (July 2005). Project Quality Management: Why, What and How).
On one hand, the quality control focuses on process output, on the other hand the quality assurance comprises administrative and procedural activities that starts from the collecting data, comparison with a standard, monitoring of processes and an analyzing the feedback for preventing future errors.
(to be continued..)