Quality Assurance vs Quality Control

John Spacey, updated on January 13, 2017

Quality assurance is the process of addressing the causes of quality failures. This includes areas such as materials, designs, engineering, organizational structures, processes, systems and human factors.

Quality control is the process of detecting non-conformances to requirements and specifications in the context of projects and day-to-day operations such as an assembly line.

Difference

Quality assurance is an effort to improve an organization to produce quality. Quality control is a process that simply detects non-conformances to quality goals in the form of functional and non-functional requirements and specifications.

Example

A luggage manufacturer has a quality assurance and quality control team. The quality control team detects that the wheels on a particular product don't roll very easily and appear to stick. The quality assurance team investigates by engaging reliability engineering experts and operational teams. They discover that a supplier has changed the materials in a part in the wheel assembly. Quality assurance escalates to management who push the supplier to fix the problem. The quality assurance team implements a process whereby supplied parts are inspected after delivery by quality control to ensure they conform to specifications.

Quality Assurance vs Quality Control
	Quality Assurance	Quality Control
Definition	The process of addressing the causes of quality failures.	The process of detecting quality failures.