Quality Assurance

Quality Assurance (QA) is primarily concerned with defining or selecting standards that should be applied to the software development process or software product. Daniel Galin, the author of the book Software Quality Assurance (2004) defined QA as:

The QA process selects the V&V activities, tools, and methods to support the selected quality standards. V&V is a set of activities carried out with the main objective of withholding products from shipment if they do not qualify. In contrast, QA is meant to minimize the costs of quality by introducing a variety of activities throughout the development and maintenance process in order to prevent the causes of errors, detect them, and correct them in the early stages of development. As a result, QA substantially reduces the rates of non-qualifying products. All in all, V&V activities are only a part of the total range of QA activities.