QA != Testing

gManZboy writes "Original author of Make and IBM Researcher, Stu Feldman has written an overview of what should be (but is sadly perhaps not) familiar ground to many Slashdotters: Quality Assurance. He argues that QA is not equivalent to 'testing', and also addresses the oft-experienced (apparent) conflict between QA-advocates and 'buisiness goals.'"

Comments

To sum it up

[PepeGSay]

Quality assurance is a process that runs through the entire project, testing is a component of that process.

When building software there is a tendency to lump quality assurance and testing together precipitously at the end of a project. The distinction that is made in this article is an important one, true quality and successful projects are obtained by having quality assurance as a project long process. Then you have quality assurance during requirements, design, development and yes even testing.

testing?

[fizze]

testing can only prove the presence of an error, not its absence.

On another note, QA and QM methodes may sound incredibly dull and based upon "duh - how else should I do this, dumbass?", but are in fact highly sophisticated.
Not because they are not readical new, but because they are radically in their consistency. Think of something, and its error and faults, then of their causes, and their effects and impacts. Prefferably add fault probabilities, too. Then start over again.

It is constant feedback throughout the whole design process that is most important.

Re:Requirements?

[Twylite]

There are two parts to quality. The second part of the IEEE definition is "The degree to which a system, component, or process meets customer or user needs or expectations".

Although Feldman leaves out the second part (I believe it comes from another standard), he alludes to its importance in his discussion of how stringent QA must be, indicating that software for different purposes will have different quality requirements according to the needs of its users.

Quality Assurance is not possible in the absence of requirements and specifications. Although we (the company I work for) often receive requirements with minimal detail, we have addressed the quality problem by writing a (relatively) detailed specification up front, and presenting it to the customer. Effectively we're saying "this is what you're going to get for your money, okay?". It's just prudent practice, but it gives us a goal and a way to achieve quality (by both definitions).

You can find more on the combining the technical and business approaches to quality in my essay The Quality Gap.