What is the name of your position? Are you working as a QA Analyst or QA Tester? Have you ever thought about how the position is aligned with the tasks you are performing?
QA (Quality Assurance) activities are oriented to ensure quality through the control of the processes, while QC (Quality control) activities are oriented to controlling the quality fthe product . There are many ways to do QC: with reviews, inspections, static analysis and testing, among others. Having this in mind, I would like to highlight a few issues:
- Testing is a QC activity, not a QA activity.
- Consequently, in testing we do not guarantee anything.
- There are other ways, complementary to control the quality of the product. Not everything is testing.
In this video that I filmed from Villajoyosa, Spain, I invite you to think about it.
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between QA and QC?
QA (quality assurance) activities aim to assure quality by controlling processes; QC (quality control) activities aim to control the quality of the product.
Is testing part of QA?
No: testing is one of the QC activities. And it is not the only way to control product quality: there are also reviews, inspections and static analysis, among others.
Keep reading: The most common mistakes companies make when confusing testing with quality and Validation and verification. If you want to go deeper, I recommend the course Introduction to software testing.