Question

Describe one experience you had with a poor quality product or service. Refrain from naming actual people, businesses or products. Then state briefly which quality assurance principle, concept, or approach might have helped prevent or improve the situation. A one or two paragraph answer is sufficient.

Answer 1

I bought one android mobile phone last month. While using the phone, I found that it is a defective piece. Phone is getting hanged very frequently and also getting switched off automatically.

It is well understood that manufactured did not follow the quality assurance process properly.

Quality Assurance (QA): It is defined as an activity to make sure that an organization is providing the best possible product or service to their customers. QA centers around improving the processes to deliver quality products to the customer. An organization has to make sure, that processes are efficient and effective as per the quality standards defined for the product. Quality Assurance is popularly known as Quality Assurance Testing

Quality Assurance principle and approach:

Quality assurance has a defined cycle, and it is called PDCA cycle or Deming cycle. The phases of the PDCA cycle are:

• Plan
• Do
• Check
• Act

The above steps are repeated to make sure that processes followed in the organization are evaluated and improved on a periodic basis.

• Plan - Any organization must plan and establish the process related objectives and determine the processes that are necessary to deliver a high-quality end product.
• Do - Development and testing of the processes and also "do" the changes in the processes as necessary.
• Check - Monitoring of the processes, modifying the processes, and check whether it meets the predetermined objectives.
• Act - Implementation of the actions that are necessary to achieve improvements in the processes.

Any organization must follow the Quality Assurance procedure to make sure that the product is designed and implemented with the correct procedures. This assists to reduce the problems and errors, in the final product.

Quality assurance principle or approach that would have helped to prevent or improve this situation:

• Planning proper process of manufacturing and releasing the phone in market
• Making a robust testing environment for the mobile phone
• Selecting the release criteria cautiously
• Applying automated testing to high-risk areas. It assists to fasten the entire process.
• Distributing the  time appropriately for each process
• Prioritizing the bugs fixing based on the usage
• Taking corrective action to fix the detected bugs
• Making dedicated security and performance testing team

Conclusion:

Quality Assurance is to check whether the product developed is suitable for using. For that, Organization must have some processes and standards to be followed which need to be improved on a periodic basis. It focuses mainly on the quality of product or service that are provided to the customers.