What is Quality Assurance and Quality Control? Quality Assurance and Quality Control are two aspects of the Quality management or Quality system that are often used interchangeably.
What is Quality Assurance?
Quality assurance can be defined as a part of Quality management's focus on providing confidence that quality requirements will be fulfilled. Quality assurance is a part of quality management on quality requirements.
The confidence provided by Quality assurance is twofold.
Internally to the management
Externally to the Customer, Government agencies, Regulator, Certifier, or any other authorized third party.
Lead or sample auditing is part of the Quality assurance function. It is important and critical to ensuring Quality because it is used to compare the actual conditions with the desired or required condition and report the same to the management of an organization
What is Quality Control?
Quality control can be defined as a part of Quality management focused on fulfilling quality requirements. While Quality assurance relates to how a process is performed or how a product is made, quality control is more an inspection aspect of Quality management.
The major difference between Quality Assurance and Quality Control is a Quality assurance if process-oriented and Quality Control is product-oriented.
History of Quality assurance and Quality control?
Quality Control: In 1920 the Industrial Revolution and the rise of mass production, it becomes important to better define and control the quality of products.
Originally the goal of Quality Control was to ensure that engineering requirements were met at the time of the final product.
Quality Assurance: In 1950 the Quality profession expanded to include the Quality assurance and Quality audit functions.