What is Quality Assurance? Definition, Process & Best Practices

This is the time when competition is just a click away, customers expect quality instead of just working things out. As competition never sleeps, Quality Assurance (QA) comes in, which isn’t about only ticking the checkboxes.

This is a way to build trust with your clients, enhance your confidence, and improve performance for better outcomes.

Are you seeking more information about QA, its process, and best practices? Hopefully, you do. So, keep reading because I’ve compiled a detailed guide on this to help you perfect your service before it reaches the client.

Quality Assurance (QA) is a systematic approach to finding out if a product or service consistently meets the established standards.

This is a proactive process of finding and improving defects within the production lifecycle as from designing to completion. For example, a freelancer can check for QA while freelancing for clients or businesses.

Here are the types of QA to check out: Which type are you working on?

• Process Quality Assurance: A systematic approach to find the right process to meet the quality standards.
• Product Quality Assurance: A QA approach to determine if the product or service meets the established quality requirements.
• Organizational Quality Assurance: This is a broad QA approach that is implemented in an organization to ensure that it works on promoting QA.
• Supplier Quality Assurance: When the supplier works best to meet QA standards in the materials and components.

Here are the quality assurance process steps to understand things better in a way to meets the set standards easily.

First of all, you need to establish clear and SMART goals and acceptance criteria for your product or service from the client.

You can ask your client about their specific requirements, like what they want for their project, or ask more to estimate how they like.

These set goals will elaborate on the pathway to meet the standards of the product or service quality.

You may continue to analyze the process to find better opportunities and improve the defects to meet the standard quality.

Now, you need to implement a testing and verification process, whether you choose automatic or manual, to ensure your product or service quality.

Automatic testing may show false results sometimes; therefore, manual testing is preferred as a whole.

After setting up your testing and verification method, you need to implement a defect management system to meet the established quality goals.

You can go for a systematic approach to track and set the defects in priority to make sure that your service or product is error-free.

You can set a consistent audit time to prioritize checking for updates from your service or product to ensure a standard quality meeting.

When you do a prioritizing audit within the process, you will actually get to know the defects to remove for a quality service.

Before sending reports to the client, you should make sure that your tester personnel will like your service.

That’s a way to establish your unique and innovative approach to meet the standard quality requirements for your client.

If you are working with a professional team on a single project in different places to meet the quality standards, then effective collaboration and communication are necessary.

Effective collaboration and communication are a way to deliver quality while staying focused on your goal.

Finally, it’s time for the documentation process to make sure a smooth testing and implementation process.

Moreover, it will help you maintain a sense of transparency for clients about how much effort you have put into the quality standards.

Here are the 6 proven practices for QA to meet the established expectations of clients and quality standards according to the market.

1. Define Clear Goals: Firstly, set SMART goals to ensure that your product or service will meet the specific requirements.
2. Implement Testing Strategies: Implement testing strategies to continuously test your service or product to make sure if it is according to the requirements.
3. Collaboration and Communication: Collaborate with your team members and make communication easier for better transformation of your thoughts for quality-driven QA.
4. Manage Defects Effectively: Continuously testing will help you find defects within your service or product that enables you to manage defects effectively.
5. Implement Technology and Innovation: You need to implement innovation and advanced technology to meet the modern standards of QA.
6. Focus on Customer Experience: Most importantly, you have to focus on customer experience. If they enjoy it, then your quality will automatically be verified.

So, that’s all about the Quality Assurance definition, process, and best practices to meet the established quality standards. That’s a reality check that you can do to make sure that the product or service you’re offering is efficient.

Moreover, you are free to know if your project matched the client’s expectations and needs to establish yourself as a retention-friendly freelancer. This is the pathway to meet the clients’ expectations and set yourself up as a trustworthy service provider.