What is the difference between quality control and quality assurance?

Quality Control is a set of activities for ensuring quality in products. The activities focus on identifying defects in the actual products produced.

Quality Assurance is a set of activities for ensuring quality in the processes by which products are develop.

Quality Control is to insure the validity of your work result.

Quality Assurance is to insure the use of the correct processes and the correct impelemnation of those processes while executing the project work.

Although QA and QC are closely related concepts, and are both aspects of quality management, they are fundamentally different in their focus:

• QC is used to verify the quality of the output.
• QA is the process of managing for quality.

Achieving success in a project requires both QA and QC. If we only apply QA, then we have a set of processes that can be applied to ensure great quality in our delivered solution, but the delivered solution itself is never actually quality-checked.

Likewise, if we only focus on QC then we are simply conducting tests without any clear vision for making our tests repeatable, for understanding and eliminating problems in testing, and for generally driving improvement into the means we use to deliver our ICT solutions.

In either case, the delivered solution is unlikely to meet the customer expectation or satisfy the business needs that gave rise to the project in the first place.

QC is concern with the deliverables of the projects, it is done by project manager and the out put is verified deliverables which becomes input to validate scope (testing the deliverables by the custometer and the output may be accepted deliverables.)

QA is primary concern with process improvement for the activities and the project processes. and a major output of QC process is quality control measurement with is input to QA

Quality control is monitoring and handling the product quality as per the specific standard or as per specifications required from the customer. It may be achieved through the production process or after the production completion.

Quality Assurance, It is used to ensure using the real & right procedures in the Manufacturing & producing of a certain product to avoid any defects & mistakes in the manufacturing process. This will give output as requested which has to be subject to Quality Control to be accepted finally.

The difference is that QA is process oriented and QC is product oriented.

Quality Control is a criteria set to meet the client requirements, while;

Quality Assurance is preventing to make defects on a manufactured materials

Quality Control - refers to a set of processes that is focused on ensuring that a product or service meets set standards of quality (i.e. the requirements/demands of the consumer/customer).

Quality Assurance - refers to the system that ensures that these processes are free of defects/loopholes that would adversely affect the product.

Quality control , normally reactive is a line function while Quality assurance being proactive is a staff function where quality control deals with the identification of the defects & quality assurance deals with the prevention of the defects.Quality assurance documentation provides a higher degree of confidence that a system or process is capable of achieving its desired targets.

The quality assurance is the specs and standards which shall implemented by or through the quality control in the field.

QA Basically looks at the process that produces a product and evaluates possible risks and how they can be mitigated so that the quality is not compromised.

QC Is product oriented mainly