Ensuring Quality
In many companies, software quality assurance is considered synonymous with software integration and system testing. This is quite erroneous. Although testing is part of the quality assurance process, it is, arguably, one of the less important parts. The philosophical rationale behind this assertion is that quality must be built in to the system and ensured throughout the entire project lifecycle. If done perfectly, there would be no need to test software at the end of the development cycle, since it would have no defects by that stage. Of course, flawless software systems remain more of a dream than a reality. Hence, practically speaking, testing is an indispensable part of the quality assurance process.
The purpose of software quality assurance is to ensure that: