What is Quality Assurance?
Quality Assurance (QA) is a process that ensure products and services meet defined quality, reliability, and performance standards. In software and systems development, QA helps teams identify defects, improve user experience, and deliver a consistent user experience (UX).
Unlike Quality Control (QC), which focuses on identifying defects in finished products, Quality Assurance (QA) is proactive. Quality Assurance builds quality into the process from the start.
Plus, Quality Control is more relevant to the manufacturing industry.
How Quality Assurance Works
In software development, Quality Assurance (QA) is embedded across the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC). In the narrow sense of software QA, it ensures code meets functional and non-functional requirements before release. Hence, Quality Assurance is critical in validating that what’s built works as intended, performs reliably, and meets user expectations.
Here’s how QA fits into the software lifecycle:
Test planning and design – QA teams create test plans based on user stories, acceptance criteria, and risk areas. This includes defining test cases for functionality, performance, security, and edge conditions.
Environment setup – QA configures test environments that mirror production as closely as possible, ensuring accurate validation across browsers, devices, and configurations.
Test execution – Manual and automated tests are run to validate features, catch regressions, and uncover defects. This includes unit, integration, system, and exploratory testing.
Defect reporting and triage – Bugs are logged with detailed reproduction steps, severity ratings, and environment context. QA collaborates with developers to prioritize and verify fixes.
Release readiness checks – Before deployment, QA performs final validation sweeps, often including smoke tests, sanity checks, and regression runs, to confirm stability and completeness.
Post-release feedback – QA may monitor telemetry, user feedback, and support tickets to identify missed issues and feed them into future test coverage.
Note: QA doesn’t own product quality alone. In fact, it collaborates with developers, product managers, and designers. Its role is to validate, not dictate, and its impact grows when embedded early and supported by automation.
Why Quality Assurance Matters
QA matters because it protects brand reputation, reduces rework, and ensures customer satisfaction. It’s essential across small apps and systems, ERP systems in regulated industries, high-availability systems, and user-facing applications.
The importance of proper QA cannot be overlooked. Its key benefits include:
Early defect detection – Catch issues before they reach production.
Improved user experience – Deliver intuitive, reliable, and performant products.
Reduced cost of failure – Fixing bugs early is cheaper than post-release remediation.
Compliance assurance – Meet industry standards and regulatory requirements.
Types of Quality Assurance and its Components
Use this checklist to evaluate QA maturity and coverage:
QA types
Functional testing – Validates features against requirements.
Performance testing – Measures speed, scalability, and responsiveness.
Security testing – Identifies vulnerabilities and compliance gaps.
Usability testing – Assesses user experience and accessibility.
Regression testing – Ensures new changes don’t break existing functionality.
The following are the five main components of the QA process:
Test strategy – Defines scope, objectives, and methods for quality validation.
Test automation – Scripts and tools that run repeatable tests across builds.
Manual testing – Exploratory and scenario-based testing by QA analysts.
CI/CD integration – Embeds QA into automated pipelines for faster feedback.
Metrics and reporting – Tracks defect rates, test coverage, and release readiness.
Why the mix matters: Combining manual insight with automation and CI/CD integration ensures speed, depth, and coverage.
Examples & Use Cases of Quality Assurance
These examples show how QA supports product and process excellence:
Agile sprint QA – QA engineers write test cases alongside developers and run automated tests in each sprint.
Release readiness – A product team uses regression and performance tests to validate stability before launch.
Compliance QA – A healthcare app undergoes security and accessibility testing to meet HIPAA and WCAG standards.
Customer support feedback loop – QA integrates bug reports from support teams into test scenarios for future releases.
FAQs about Quality Assurance
How is QA different from QC?
QA is proactive and process-oriented, it prevents defects. QC is reactive and product-focused; it identifies defects after development. The latter is more relevant to the manufacturing industry.
Do we need QA if we have automated tests?
Yes. Automation speeds up testing, but QA also includes planning, strategy, exploratory testing, and process improvement.
What metrics show QA is working?
Common metrics include defect density, test coverage, mean time to detect (MTTD), mean time to resolve (MTTR), and release stability.
What is the role of QA?
In software development, the Quality Assurance (QA) role ensures that software meets defined standards for functionality, reliability, performance, and usability before it reaches users.
How do we scale QA in fast-moving teams?
Use shift-left testing, embed QA in CI/CD pipelines, prioritize automation, and align QA with sprint planning and retrospectives.
How Platforms Handle the QA Process
Different platforms support QA through automation, integration, and analytics:
Jira + Zephyr/TestRail – Link test cases to user stories, track execution, and report defects.
Selenium/Cypress – Automate browser-based functional tests.
Postman + JMeter – Validate APIs and performance under load.
CI/CD tools (GitHub Actions, Jenkins, Azure DevOps) – Run tests automatically on every code change.
Monitoring platforms (Datadog, New Relic) – Detect post-release issues and feed insights back into QA.
QA is most effective when integrated across tools, teams, and workflows.
Executive Takeaway
Quality Assurance reduces risk, improves customer satisfaction, and accelerates delivery. Your team should build QA into an end-to-end process of product and system development.
You can start by defining quality goals, integrating QA into planning and development, and using metrics to drive improvement. Treat QA as a shared responsibility across product, engineering, and operations.
Good IT consulting firms use a methodological approach to integrate the QA process into their deliverables, such as to validate client requirements, reduce post-launch risk, and ensure compliance with quality and user experience requirements.
