What Is Quality Assurance? (Plus QA Job Descriptions)

Updated 27 February 2023

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Every product or service goes through a quality regulation system to ensure its performance is as predicted. The importance of quality check-ups in any product development life cycle cannot be ignored. Understanding the divide between quality assurance (QA) and quality control (QC) and their sole duties can prove valuable for any employee. In this article, we shall learn what is quality assurance, why is it important, the difference between QA and QC and the ideal skill set to become a QA professional.

What is quality assurance?

Quality assurance is a process that lays thorough emphasis on the quality of the product by paying attention across all stages from innovation, production and delivery. There are QA metrics that help accurately predict the outcome of a product's performance within its target market. Tweaking these metrics and bringing them closer to the ideal product standards is what allows a service to stand out. Quality assurance management may be assigned to an individual or a team of QA professionals such as managers, testers, analysts and investigators.

QA pipelines exist in all industries, ranging from technology, financial, media and entertainment, to design and healthcare as well. Without a trustworthy QA team, it's hard to identify how long a product or service can maintain its positioning in the market. The more exacting the QA methods are, the better the end product may be.

Why is quality insurance important?

Quality assurance is important since its execution builds confidence and a reputation for a product. Firstly, the company selling the product or service can be sure of their project and create business models accordingly. Secondly, the consumers can rely on the product owing to the perfection in its functionality. Additionally, prospective investors, regulatory bodies and third party collaborators also develop a greater liking towards a product or service that undergoes strict quality assurance.

What is the role of quality assurance?

Quality assurance plays the role that strengthens the authenticity of a product or service. They amplify the focus on intricate details that sets the impression of the product in the face of consumers. Most of the quality assurance cycles work in tandem with the company's quality standards. This can involve detailed inspections, detecting problems, choosing amongst a list of solutions and delivering a 100% flaw-free product or service. The role of QA specialists is process-oriented, with a goal to diagnose and resolve problems in a product or service.

Difference between quality assurance and quality control

Quality control is a smaller part of quality assurance. QA encompasses everything about the process of product ideating, manufacturing and delivering. In contrast, QC inspects the quality regulation cycles and supports the entire list of requirements for quality management. You can consider QA to be the bigger regulation role that oversees the product creation phase. QA experts guarantee the quality of the product before they're released. QC experts resolve defects that were identified after the product was released. QA revolves around avoiding defects in the product's development lifespan and QC is responsible for maintaining the QA's efforts and fixing issues.

Consider a software development company. In order to keep up with their sales and customer retention rate, they have to be consistent with the quality of the software they produce. They deploy QA teams to curate a streamlined process for the employees to design software that precisely meets the client's demanded standards. QC teams work on the software to eradicate bugs and inconsistencies that deteriorate the software's quality. They are the core executors of assessing necessary changes in usability and performance and implementing them. Being a QC employee, you are responsible for checking the software's working on different devices.

Skills needed for a quality assurance specialist

Here are the mandatory skills required to be hired as a QA specialist. Each of these skills can also be referred to as qualities and do not reflect the applicant's educational qualifications:

Detail-oriented

The littlest of overlooked problems in a product or service could be the number one reason for its downfall. This is why all QA specialists need to function with a detail-oriented approach and pinpoint even the tiniest discrepancies and unappealing aspects of the product.

For example, look at the automobile industry. Assume a specific part in the car's engine is causing an imbalance towards the company's promise to offer a vehicle with a top speed of 200 km/hr. A sub-part of this instrument needs some alterations to achieve this speed goal. The QA specialist needs to diagnose the part, conduct an investigation into its efficacy and assure that the company meets its promises.

Statistical analysis

A grasp of basic analytics is imperative since it helps to study large sets of data. Based on studying such datasets, QA specialists use analytics and focus on product parts that need improvements.

Studying statistics becomes easier if you've developed an analytical mindset. For instance, spotting a spike in sales because of one unique feature translates to the QA specialist diverting attention on maximising the effectiveness and performance of that feature.

Composure

Without composure, it becomes impossible to resolve issues in the quality of the product. In matters related to software, QA specialists have to recheck large portions of code to find a single flaw.

Moreover, often a hoard of different methodologies are applied to figure the required solution. If the QA management team isn't patient, they skip these bugs instead of catching them.

Communication

QA specialists need to communicate with several teams at once to clearly indicate their study and what is the new requirement. These teams could range from design, finance, packaging and logistics too. Thus, clarity in communication mediums such as emails, calls and face-to-face discussions needs to be on-point.

In many companies, the message gets lost in translation owing to several reasons. An experienced QA specialist avoids such incidents and ensures that the receiver understands 100% of the message.

Problem-solving

The better half of the quality assurance process depends on problem-solving skills. These problems could either be a design flaw, ignored convenience metric or something as random as an inefficient checkout cart. To overpower such roadblocks, the QA expert must be proficient in brainstorming and coming up with a solution-centric result.

For example, consider a smartphone application for the EdTech industry. There were lesser conversions from leads to clients because of some design flaws at the checkout page of the application. The QA specialist must collaborate with the design team and nullify this flaw. Though this involves getting into some details of design, it confirms the presence of a problem-solving skill set.

Popular jobs in quality assurance

Here is a list of updated information on some quality assurance jobs, along with their average salaries:

1. Quality assurance tester

National Average Salary: ₹20,380 per month

Primary Responsibilities: QA testers conduct tests to evaluate the defects in products or services. Their responsibility is to figure solutions for a problem and identify the source problem that stops the product from functioning as expected. They further communicate their observations to a higher authority that works on incorporating the newfound information.

2. Quality assurance auditor

National Average Salary: ₹4,15,933 per year

Primary Responsibilities: QA auditors establish parameters to test products and services. They also monitor the processes used by QA managers, testers and engineers. Most importantly, they guarantee that a company's QA guidelines are in compliance with government regulations, without any chance of a lapse in the quality of the output.

3. Quality assurance manager

National Average Salary: ₹41,352 per month

Primary Responsibilities: They play the deciding role on QA procedures and specifications. Apart from setting in-house standards that help establish the client's QA process, QA managers also coordinate across the entire team of QA specialists. They also communicate directly with the client to understand the project with a more detailed approach.

4. Quality assurance engineer

National Average Salary: ₹5,01,839 per year

Primary Responsibilities: A QA engineer creates test formats that organisations can use to study their product development processes. They work in sync with design teams to establish a systematic process to conduct QA tests. Additionally, they are responsible for preparing documentation sheets that are used as guidelines by other teams.

Salary figures reflect data listed on Indeed Salaries at time of writing. Salaries may vary depending on the hiring organisation and a candidate's experience, academic background and location.