Quality Assurance Plan

• The objective of quality assurance plan is to develop and design the activities related to quality control project for the organization. It is a composite document containing all the information related to the quality control activities. It is used to schedule the reviews and audits for checking different business components and also to check the correctness of these testing procedures as defined in the plan. The quality management team is totally responsible to build up the primary design of the plan. To develop this plan, certain steps are followed, which are described below.
o Step 1: To define the quality goals for the processes. These goals will be accepted unconditionally by the developer and the customer, both. These objectives are to be clearly described in the plan, so that both the parties can understand easily the scope of the processes. The developers might also set a standard to define the goals. If possible, the plan can also describe the quality goals in terms of measurement. This will ultimately help to measure the performance of the processes in terms of gradation.
o Step 2: To define the organization and the roles and responsibilities of the participant activities. It should include the reporting system for the outcome of the quality reviews. The quality team should know where to submit the reports, directly to the developers or somebody else. In many cases, the reports are submitted to the project review team, who in turn delivers the report to the subsequent departments and keeps it in storage for records. Whatever is the process of reporting, it should be well defined in the plan to avoid disputes or complications in the submission process for reviews and audits.
o Step 3: The subsidiary quality assurance plan: It includes the list of other related plans describing project standards, which have references in any of the process. These subsidiary plans are related to the quality standards of several business components and how they are related to each other in achieving the collective qualitative objective. This information also helps to determine the different types of reviews to be done and how often they will be performed. Normally, the included referenced plans are identified below.
 Documentation Plan
 Measurement Plan
 Risk Measurement Plan
 Problem Resolution Plan
 Configuration Management Plan
 Product Development Plan
 Test Plan
 Subcontractor Management Plan etc.
o Step 4: To identify the task and activities of the quality control team. Generally, this will include following reviews.
 Reviewing project plans to ensure that the project abide by the defined process.
 Reviewing project to ensure the performance according to the plans.
 Endorsement of variation from the standard process.
 Assessing the improvement of the processes.
It is the responsibility of the quality manager, to fix the schedule for the reviews and audits to conduct quality control. This schedule is also documented within the plan, so that task control can be done at an individual level.
Thus, the entire process of quality control is documented within the plan. This helps as a guideline for the reviewers and developers, simultaneously. For any future reference, this could be used as a practical evidence of total quality control.