Every time you release a new product, you have to make sure that it works properly, and there are no bugs hiding under its stylish design. Quality Assurance and Quality Control are essential parts of this process, and they seem to be pretty similar. But they are not the same.
QA: To prevent failures
In other words, QA is the maintenance of your product’s level of quality. Its main mission is to improve both development and testing processes, which will allow preventing the occurrence of defects during the development lifecycle. Besides, QA implementation has a beneficial impact on planning and your team’s productivity.
QC: To detect failures
The mission of QC is to find all the defects AFTER the product was developed and BEFORE it will be released. It allows ensuring that the product meets all the requirements.
What is the difference?
We guess you have already understood the main distinction: QA is about preventing failures, while QC is all about finding them. QA involves process-oriented activities, such as methodology and standards development, conducting internal audits, etc. In turn, product-oriented activities are the prerogative of QC. These include performing testing, performing inspections, and so on.
Obviously, combining QA and QC is the best way to make your project successful. If you apply only QA, you will get nothing but a set of processes of excellent quality. If you go only for QC, you will be simply conducting tests without clear understanding if there are any mistakes in these tests, and why the tests themselves should be repeatable. So that, always make sure that you apply both QA and QC