Many people have misconception that QA, QC and Testing are related concepts. But the truth is that these concepts are not closely related, they are, different. Some people relate these terms ultimately to the quality of the product which is not true. All these terms have different processes, but they can be a subset of one another. Let us have a look into each of these terms one by one more briefly.

QA: QA stands for Quality Assurance which incorporates the activities ensuring the quality of the product developed. In Quality Assurance, all the processes are monitored for prevention of defects. QA ensures that the product developed is defect free and is deliverable to the customer. Quality Assurance can also be defined as the processes that assures quality is attained effectively in an efficient way. QA is a subset of Software Test Life Cycle (STLC). 

Let us take an example for better understanding of QA, if an error is found in an application and the error is removed from that application, then QA assures that the error will not be encountered again or second time in that application. The responsibility of quality assurance team is to ensure that the product verifies the customer expectations and didn’t encounter any error again.

QC: QC stands for Quality control which is used for verification purposes. In quality control, the verification is performed by ensuring that the requirements are met in our software product as mentioned in the requirement documents. We can better understand QC as product oriented because in quality control, it is more focused that the results should meet as per desired by customer. Quality Control includes detecting bugs and the testing of the software. While QA is preventive process, which prevents the defects in the product, QC is corrective process, which corrects the defects found in the product. Therefore, Quality Control can be considered as a subset of Quality Assurance as the former prevents and latter corrects the defects in an application. 

Let us take an example of Quality Control, if a product is tested and any defect is found then it is decided with stakeholders whether to remove the defect from the application or not. Quality Control can be achieved by using technical reviews approach, testing of the software and organizing code inspections for the programs written for software.

Testing: Testing is a process of evaluating the product for any faults or bugs that can harm the hardware or can give incorrect results. Testing can be considered as a subset of Quality Control as its main purpose is to detect bugs and fix them. Therefore, we can say that testing is a further process after the Quality control. It is the actual testing which tests the software application for any bugs and introduces processes required to fix those errors. Testing is also a product-oriented process very similar to Quality Control. We can also call it as an integral part of Quality Control. As in testing, we test the product for bugs and remove them, so it is also a preventive process similar to Quality Assurance. Hence, we can say that Testing has both qualities of QA and QC. But one should understand the difference between types of testing such that all its types have its own advantages and disadvantages. We will discuss the types of testing later in this tutorial.

For example: If we started testing a software application, then while testing if any error is found which is impacting the overall working of the application software, then it is required to remove the bug or error as soon as possible by the team. 

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