Quality Control (QC) Standard Process for Managers
What is a quality control (QC) process, and how to establish a standard quality control process is a question that managers often need to consider.
What is the role of a Quality Control (QC) Manager?
A quality control (QC) process is a set of procedures aimed at ensuring that a product is manufactured or a service is delivered in compliance with specified quality criteria or meets the requirements of a customer or client. Similar to quality control processes but not identical is the quality assurance (QA) process. While quality assurance (QA) addresses the confirmation that the defined requirements have been met by a product or service, the quality control process deals with the actual testing of these elements.
To perform an effective quality control process, a business first needs to decide which specific standards a product or service must adhere to. Then, the extent of quality control process actions must be determined.
Product quality is often affected by deviations from target specifications and high variability around the target technical parameters. Effective product quality control can address both of these issues. It can help businesses improve their products in the market and establish brand recognition. It also aids in addressing legal responsibility concerns, planning and decision-making, and customer needs. Efforts and finances related to product distribution can be significantly improved with the help of quality control.
What does a QC manager do?
A Quality Control (QC) Manager oversees employees and supervises product development processes to ensure that products meet quality standards and are effective. Quality control managers also work with customers to ensure that final products meet their needs and requirements.
To succeed as a Quality Control Manager (QC Manager), you need excellent communication and listening skills, along with strong observation, analysis, and problem-solving skills. You should have an understanding of regulatory compliance and have a solid grasp of scientific and technical data.
Quality Control Managers are responsible for ensuring that products are produced to meet specified quality standards, reliability, and performance.
Their job description requires establishing and implementing quality requirements for inside/outside the company to ensure that the company’s products/services meet customer expectations.
In carrying out their duties, quality control managers conduct evaluations of the company's production processes to develop in-house quality policies, processes, and specifications.
Product quality control process for QC manager
The product quality control process should start early in the product development life cycle as it is at the requirement acquisition stage and includes the following activities:
Requirements Analysis
Repairing a defect found during testing costs up to 15 times more than preventing an issue at the requirements design stage. To avoid that, quality control experts are involved in analyzing and clarifying software functional and non-functional requirements and ensuring that they are clear, consistent, complete, traceable, and testable. They prevent software errors and create optimal conditions for upcoming test design activities.
Test Planning
Quality control professionals use the knowledge obtained during requirements analysis as a basis for test planning. According to IEEE 29119-3, a test plan must include test strategy and test scope, project budget and timeline, types and levels of required testing, defect monitoring and reporting procedures, and responsibilities for resources and other elements.
Test Design
At this stage, quality control professionals design test cases or checklists that include software requirements. Test cases outline conditions, test data (also prepared at the test design stage), and necessary steps for specific functional testing and expected test results. To get familiar with an application and take an optimal approach to test design, testing engineers can start test design activities with a certain amount of exploratory testing.
Execution and Defect Reporting
Testing execution starts at the unit level, when development team members perform unit testing. Then, the baton is passed to API and UI testing. Manual testing engineers execute prepared test cases and report found issues in the bug tracking system, while automation engineers use chosen frameworks (e.g., Selenium, Appium, Protractor) to run automated test scripts and generate test reports.
Retesting and Regression Testing
After the defects found are fixed, testing engineers perform retesting to ensure that defects have been corrected. Also, regression testing is performed to verify that defect fixes did not introduce new issues and to ensure that the software meets the defined requirements.
Release Testing
When the development team issues a release note (containing a list of implemented features, bug fixes, known issues, and limitations), the testing team identifies which functionality of the software has been affected by introduced changes and determines which test cases are necessary to cover the scope of the developed release.
The testing team executes smoke testing to ensure that the build is stable, and once it passes, they proceed to execute identified test cases, reporting the results upon completion.
We hope this blog from Aniday provide you information quality control (QC) as well as its responsibilities. Good luck!
