The activity of collecting evidence to satisfy all concerned parties that the product or service of a company meets expected standards.

Often abbreviated as QA, this term refers to a systematic component of quality management. QA takes the form of procedures that monitor the existence and effectiveness of measures directly involved in production that assure that the quality of products is sufficiently high. These procedures cover a wide range of areas, such as design, development, production, installation, servicing, and documentation. Often they employ statistical process control to decrease the likelihood of unexpected failure to within a given amount of standard deviations from the mean of a normal distribution.