ATLAS Quality Assurance - What's in a name?
The verb "to control" means to "check, verify or regulate" whereas "to assure" means "to make certain or to ensure the happening" (Oxford English Dictionary)
The term "QUALITY CONTROL" is often used in industrial processes where an object can be accepted or rejected according to some metric.
But to reduce the rate of rejection it is necessary to :
- Install a procedure of production which will increase the probability of acceptance of the final result.
- Follow the procedure
- Verify (and certify) that the procedure has been followed.
It is this procedure which is known as "QUALITY ASSURANCE"
Quality Assurance is the appropriate term for software because :
- It happens throughout all the development of the software - from the requirements to the final code.
- Software is not mass produced.
- Software metrics are mostly intangible - and thus it is difficult to apply an acceptation test.
- By its very nature, software is rarely rejected - because it is so easily modified. (After all, that is why we call it "soft".)
Quality Assurance implies that our software will not be judged by some kind of police action, but that we should all be a bit more careful in our software development!
Write down what you are going to do, do what you have written, check that what you wrote/did is what you did/wrote