Differences between testing and quality assurance
For many people, testing is about assuring the quality of a system, making testing and quality assurance (QA) the same.
Whilst the focus on quality in testing is welcome, testing forms a part of QA, not the whole.
Testing is a form of quality control – does it do what it should and if not, what should we do next? A set of quality control points will form part of the QA process. In software development, quality control points apply across the software development- perhaps adhering to coding standards for developers, gaining sign-off from stakeholders, and possibly seeking feedback from customers.
If we consider the entirety of quality processes, then we call this Quality Management (QM). This would be processes applied across the whole organization in order to assure overall quality.
Discussion – how would root cause analysis and holding retrospectives form part of QA?