Evolving Perceptions of Quality Assurance

Before the production of software and information technologies  had become widely used, quality has long been matched  with physical objects or systems, such as automobiles, tools, radio receivers, television  receivers and others. Due to this fact, quality assurance is often associated with the production process.

The emphasis is on ensuring that products meet their requirements. Moreover, these requirements often come with the end-products in order to give customers or users opportunity to test them for compliance.

For instance, in the manual on the use of stereo equipment  their technical requirements are often compiled  according to physical measurements, total harmonic  distortion, frequency response or some other relevant data.

Since a lot of points in the technical requirements of the product are compiled according to the ranges and acceptance limit of errors, deviations decrease in production has been the place where the statistical quality control may focus.

Problems associated with quality are synonymous to discrepancy to technical requirements or observed errors caused by this discrepancy. For instance, the typically used “initial quality” for vehicles  can be determined as the average number of reported errors per 100 automobiles  by owners during the first 3 years of using car based on actual survey results.

One more typically used quality measure for vehicles,  reliability, is calculated by a number of problems over a longer period of time for different phases of the existence of a vehicle. That’s why, it is usually considered to be the most important measure of quality for used automobiles.

During the development of services appears new point of view about quality.  It is that business has to adapt to  dynamic changing expectations of  consumers focusing on quality control which is changed from zero defect in  products to zero defection of consumers.

Clients’ loyalty due to their common experience of working with the service is more important than just compliance with established standards and technical requirements.

Software industry has brought together the correspondence and official views on the quality, and software with high quality can be determined by such major elements as compliance, adaptability and innovation.

This view generally shares many beliefs about the quality of software that have been described above. There are many reasons to change the point of view about the quality and other areas of quality assurance concentration.

For instance, the main hypothesis of the physical restrictions, integrity, composition and decomposition, and others cannot be developed more or  displayed in the shifting  world of software.