My all-time free consultation services for test automation is driving me nuts.

Seriously!

Last week, I received so many emails and answer request on Quora, regarding explaining about the difference between Software Quality Assurance and Software Testing. One line was common in those emails.

Software Quality Assurance is Same as Software Testing?

Most of the time, I have the answers to whatever questions are asked regarding software or web application testing automation. But, this question was something with which I got confused too.

Now, as I am recently working on an SEO project for my old time favorite client Lisa (now friend) who is into application development industry. I pinged her on Skype to ask this small yet very confusing question. I know I was disturbing her in the early morning around 7:00 AM when she was preparing to board a train to work. But still, she called me to provide me the detailed information on what is software testing and software quality assurance actually.

What is Software Quality Assurance?

Software Quality Assurance is an approach which contains a proper order or logical plan to recognize, explain and edit a set of procedures that will help the organizations to deliver the bug-free applications.

Here, software quality assurance includes working to generate and execute the processes and the methods which will enhance the overall application development cycle.

What is Software Testing?

The processes that are defined by Software Quality Assurance will now be scheduled for execution. This comes into Software Testing part.

Yes, that’s true.

Software testing will include the execution of the processes to make sure organizations deliver the bug-free applications.
With software testing, the organizations will verify and validate the application to find out the bugs or errors, locate them and manage them as well.

BUT

Yes, there is a small “BUT” with the above explanation.

There is a very thin line difference between these two.

What is the main role of software quality assurance?

When the software testing is being performed, test cases are executed and the bugs are detected to fix them as soon as possible to make the application bug-free and successful. But, this does not include the working of software quality assurance.

Software quality assurance only becomes the part of the project when it defines the set of standards to be followed by the project. This will be done only to deliver the product with the highest quality. Software quality assurance will have to properly determine the metrics to calculate the quality of the processes that all the team members of the project will follow.

One more point:

There are many organizations in which they use these two terms interchangeably. Well, they say that’s perfectly fine.

Why?

Because when all the procedures, activities and steps are formulated well to ensure the best quality of the application, what’s in a name?

I completely agree to this.

Then, suddenly I argued that what about the organizations that are listed under small to medium scale categories?

Lisa explained that here most of the small and medium sized organization go for hiring external Quality Assurance that help the organizations to understand and define the quality related processes for them. Testers provide them the information about the current quality of the applications and the external quality assurance will perform an audit on them.

Well, this was all that Lisa took out the time for me to get out of my confusion.

But, later a day or two, I had a few discussions with my many clients and I found a few instances where software quality assurance is being missed.

You know what, here most of the organizations would agree with me that there are chances where you may be skipping the quality assurance part because this takes a lot of time to define the process and all. Today, on-time delivery is becoming very important and organizations tend to skip that procedure in order to deliver the application on time. I too have clients who are facing these issues.

But, sooner or later, software quality assurance would be given much higher importance as after all it is all about a SUCCESSFUL application which requires 100% quality.

So, what I understood till now is:

Software Quality Assurance is all about Quality of the Software while Software Testing is all about the bug-free software.

What’s your take on this?