QUALITY ASSURANCE

Quality assurance, or QA for short, is the activity of providing evidence needed to establish quality in work, and that activities that require good quality are being performed effectively. All those planned or systematic actions necessary to provide enough confidence that a product or service will satisfy the given requirements for quality.For products, quality assurance is a part and consistent pair of quality management offering supposedly fact-based external confidence to customers and other stakeholders that a product meets needs, expectations, and other requirements. QA claims to assure the existence and effectiveness of procedures that attempt to make sure - in advance - that the expected levels of quality will be reached.QA covers all activities from design, development, production, installation, servicing to documentation. It introduced the sayings "fit for purpose" and "do it right the first time". It includes the regulation of the quality of raw materials, assemblies, products and components; services related to production; and management, production, and inspection processes.The term Quality Assurance, as used in the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission regulation 10 CFR Part 50, Appendix B, comprises all those planned and systematic actions necessary to provide adequate confidence that a structure, system, or component will perform satisfactorily in service. Quality assurance includes quality control, which comprises those quality assurance actions related to the physical characteristics of a material, structure, component, or system which provide a means to control the quality of the material, structure, component, or system to predetermined requirements.One of the most widely used paradigms for QA management is the PDCA (Plan-Do-Check-Act) approach, also known as the Shewhart cycle.Contents1 History1.1 Early efforts to control the quality of production1.2 Wartime production1.3 Postwar2 Quality assurance activities2.1 Failure testing2.2 Statistical control2.3 Total quality control2.4 ISO 170253 Company quality4 Using Contractors and/or consultants5 Academic resources6 See also7 References8 External links//more