QA and QC in the Information Industry

1. Definition of QA and QC

QA is short for quality assurance, meaning quality assurance in Chinese; QC is in English Quality control is short for quality control.

According to ISO9000: 2000, QA is defined as "a part of quality management, committed to providing quality requirements will be satisfied with the trust", QC is defined as "a part of quality management, is committed to meeting quality requirements ".

The definitions in the standard are concise and difficult to elaborate, which may lead to unclear definitions. In short, QC is a direct commitment to meeting quality requirements for personnel and things: QA is a right person and a process, and is committed to making managers, customers and other stakeholders confident that they can meet quality requirements.

In some software/informatization standards, QA defines that "Quality assurance refers to a series of planned and necessary work to make the software products meet the prescribed requirements ." (GB/T 12504-1990 computer software quality assurance plan specifications); "to provide sufficient confidence level for a project or product to meet established technical needs, instead, we must adopt a systematic and systematic model for all actions." (GB/T11457-1995 Software Engineering terminology ). There is no direct definition of QC in both standards.

Definitions of the same term vary from different perspectives for different purposes, such as GB/T 12504-1990 and GB/T11457-1995 for QA, the QA definition in GB/T 12504-1990 covers a wide range and contains QC content.

2. Comparison between QA and QC

In a software organization or project team, there are two types of roles: QA and QC. The main focuses of these two types of roles are as follows:

Other major differences between QA and QC include:

Qualified QA is a senior talent in the organization. It must have a full understanding of the Process Definition of the Organization and be familiar with the engineering technology used in the project. qc includes both senior talents such as software testing designers, it also includes general testers and other junior talents. Foreign software enterprises require QA to have more than two years of software development experience, more than half a year of analyst and designer experience, not only to receive QA training, training in fulfilling the duties of the project manager is also required.

In the project team, QA is independent of the project manager and cannot be assessed by the project manager. qc is led by the project manager. Generally, the QC performance is determined by the Project Manager during the project operation cycle.

QA activities run throughout the project. QC activities are generally set at a specific stage of project operation, and different roles may perform different control points.

Identifying competent QA, tracking and reporting of project operations (findings) is only the basis of its responsibilities. More valuable work includes providing process support for the project team, for example, the project manager can provide cases and reference data for similar projects in the past, and introduce and interpret applicable process definition documents to project team members. QC activities mainly detect and report product defects.

3. QA work content

International and national standards are both common, and software organizations are specific and vivid. The responsibilities and content of QA in different organizations are common and specific. You can consider the content and features of QA at different levels:

3.1 Process compliance

Ensuring Process compliance is the fundamental responsibility of QA, that is, to ensure that the project team runs according to the processes specified by the Organization. Generally, QA in software organizations is committed to ensuring Process compliance to prove the ability to provide products and services with stable quality and to gain the trust to meet quality requirements.

3.2 plan conformity

Ensuring Project Plan compliance is the responsibility of the project manager, not the fundamental responsibility of QA. In some organizations, QA does not need to pay attention to plan conformity. However, plan conformity in terms of project scale, workload, progress, and defects is the focus of senior managers, as a senior manager, QA needs to keep track of and report Plan compliance. Compliance with tracking and reporting plans in many software organizations is a routine work of QA.

3.3 workpiece correctness

Work product refers to the various documents, codes, and programs generated during project running. In most software organizations, QA generally does not directly track and report the correctness of the artifacts. The root cause is that this will cause QA to become too deep in the project work, which is not conducive to maintaining the independence and objectivity of QA. Other reasons include the QA capability and time resources, which may not be sufficient for tracking and reporting the correctness of the artifacts.

4. Understand and process QA work content based on actual conditions

How to define the specific responsibility scope of QA is the responsibility of each organization. quality management standards and process improvement models only require an organization and role to fulfill a specific responsibility, organizations are not required to set up an organization, a role, or a role. Even in the same organization, different processing can be performed based on different application purposes.

For example, in a software organization that has passed the SW-CMM Level 3, the minimum scope of the QA plan only includes support, tracking, and reporting of project group activities, when outsourcing components exist in the project artifacts, follow up and report the activities of the outsourcing component developer, when the project is related to the needs, deployment, and implementation of a specific customer, it is responsible for communicating with the customer regarding quality management issues, including product and service defects. The QA and demand management plans, configuration management plans, workpiece review plans, communication plans, risk management plans, training plans, test plans, and development plans used within the Organization are separated; however, for large-scale enterprise informatization construction projects, if the customer needs to submit the QA plan to the customer to demonstrate the quality assurance capability of the Organization, it should include multiple aspects of the QA and QC plan, for example, the review plan and test plan are close to the QA activities in GB/T 12504-1990.