In a highly competitive business world, quality is what differentiates a company’s products and services from that of their competitors. Often, quality could be the clincher that helps businesses to garner the market share and also retain customers. Many consumer surveys have indicated that though customers could at times be tempted to try new and inexpensive options, in the long run, they will opt for quality over price. Two famous quotes mentioned below, perhaps, sums up the gist about quality and the expectations around it.
“Quality is not an act. It is a habit.” - Aristotle
“Quality means doing it right when no one is looking.” - Henry Ford
These quotes and the need to meet the highly discerning customer expectations in today’s scenario, spells out the importance of Quality Assurance (QA) services. QA has evolved a lot across the last few decades and is now an essential part of any organization, whether products or service-oriented.
Understanding QA
QA is the way by which an organization assures that is products and services are as per required and agreed standards and are of high quality. Today, there are many quality standards like ISO, CMMI, Six Sigma, etc. that guarantees a certain quality, when complied with. So, organizations that are compliant with these standards are telling customers that their processes are streamlined to ensure high quality. QA is used to check if the product is developed as per the agreed terms and fit to use.
QA follows the principles of - Plan->Do->Check->Act cycle to ensure that all loopholes in the processes that cause any issue is caught and eliminated. So, the idea is not to just create one high-quality product, but to ensure that the process is also tweaked every time that an issue is found, to ensure that there is no slippage at all. So, it is a proactive approach that is used to eliminate defects from the end product, before customers use it.
QA Process
The QA processes involve:
Ø Defining processes
Ø Identifying any tools and possible automation scenarios
Ø Creating awareness in the team about the importance of quality and the related processes
Ø Training of personnel on standards as well as processes and tools used
Ø Audits to ensure that the processes were followed
The objective of QA
QA has to be a habit and not just a reaction to the errors thrown up, which is audits need to be taken seriously. The processes and the audits and the non-conformances need to be documented clearly. There is an onus on the team to identify the root cause of the errors to see if they were just an oversight or whether the process needs to be corrected.
The ultimate objective of all QA services is to ensure customer satisfaction. Hence, most organizations adopt a continuous improvement approach. This means that they keep a close watch on their processes and product quality and customer feedback. Each input on any of these fronts is scrutinized thoroughly to eliminate a repeat error and ensure that the product and the process improve continuously. QA services therefore, form an integral part of every organization’s customer-focused approach. Often, the perils of ignoring QA are quite costly, and the loss of reputation due to bad quality products or services may take several years to repair, not to mention the financial implications.