Testing, Quality Control and Quality Assurance

Testing, Quality Control and Quality Assurance
Many people and organizations are confused about the difference between quality assurance (QA), quality control (QC), and testing. They are closely related, but they are different concepts. Since all three are necessary to effectively manage the risks of developing and maintaining software, it is important for software managers to understand the differences. They are defined below:

Quality Assurance: A set of activities designed to ensure that the development and/or maintenance process is adequate to ensure a system will meet its objectives.Software QA involves the entire software development PROCESS - monitoring and improving the process, making sure that any agreed-upon standards and procedures are followed, and ensuring that problems are found and dealt with. It is oriented to 'prevention'

Quality Control: A set of activities designed to evaluate a developed work product.

Testing: The process of executing a system with the intent of finding defects. (Note that the "process of executing a system" includes test planning prior to the execution of the test cases.)

Quality Assurance---All those planned and necessary ideas to provide adequate confidence that the product/service will satisfy the given requirements of quality.

Quality control---All those necessary steps taken for fulfilling the requirements of quality.

Testing-----Software testing" simply means testing the software to find and report defects.
It gives an assurance that the end product is as per customer requirement specification.