Originally written in French. Translated by AI — the meaning has been preserved, not the prose.
Short definition
The function responsible for a software product's quality — criteria, test policies, delivery standards, risks to cover, automation. Depending on context, the acronym designates the person, the team, the validation stage or the discipline.
Full definition
Quality Assurance is understood in the normative sense as the set of arrangements that give confidence a product will meet requirements. In the software field, the word most often designates something quite different — the manual test stage placed between development and going to production, and the people who staff it.
In the articles on this blog, the term keeps its sense of a function, and it is its position in the chain that is distinguished. At the end of the chain, it verifies what is already decided and can only block or let through. Upstream, it writes the framework: quality criteria, test policies, acceptable regression thresholds, areas of the product to secure, scope of automation, the signals that say whether a team is shipping better or worse. Both usages are met under the same acronym, sometimes in the same organization.
Usage in the field
Team organization discussions, defining a quality policy, arbitrating what should be automated, dividing responsibilities between development and test.
Synonyms and variants
Quality Assurance · quality assurance · tester · QA engineer.
Not to be confused with
- Delivery quality — the perimeter of practices that reduce the number of defects produced; QA is one of its means, not its equivalent.
- Test — the activity of verifying a behaviour, which can be carried out by a developer as much as by QA.
- TDD — a development discipline where the test precedes the code, held by the developers themselves and not by this function.
- Acceptance — validation of a delivery by whoever commissioned it, on the side of conformity to the request.
- Quality control (
QC) — verification of a finished product by sampling, where quality assurance bears on the process.
Examples
"QA isn't the place where developers deposit their responsibility for quality."
A QA function that defines acceptable regression thresholds and the scope of automation occupies the upstream position; a QA function whose activity is measured in defects found just before going to production occupies the downstream position.
Ambiguities / debates
The acronym designates indifferently a person, a team, a stage and a discipline, which makes it possible to discuss "QA" without the participants talking about the same object.
A second wobble: normative quality assurance bears on the process, whereas field usage almost always brings it back to testing a finished product.