Quality Assurance cheat sheet

Quality assurance criteria

• Quality assurance builds confidence that requirements will be met before and during production, and it starts with defining exactly what is being assured and against what criteria.
• Criteria are set against the organisation's actual products, services and processes, not generic industry assumptions, so an accurate inventory of what is produced and how comes first.
• A parameter is the specific, measurable characteristic being controlled, such as a dimension, a weight, a response time or a defect count.
• Critical limits are the maximum and/or minimum acceptable values for a parameter; they are set from the specification, not derived statistically from the process like control chart limits.
• A monitoring schedule fixes how often each parameter is checked and by whom, balancing the cost of monitoring against the risk of a non-conformance going undetected between checks.