Quality Assurance , refers to planned and systematic production processes (or Company Quality Management System) that provide confidence in a product’s suitability for its intended purpose. It is a set of activities intended to ensure that products (goods and/or services) satisfy customer requirements in a systematic, reliable fashion. QA cannot absolutely guarantee the production of quality products, unfortunately, but makes this more likely. It includes establishing management systems, procedures and processes, responsibilities for quality management, audits plans and corrective actions.
Quality Planning is the identification of project specific quality activities and controls which will ensure that the project delivers its requirements. It results is a quality plan for the project, defining responsibilities for quality, detailed project quality activities such as peer review, design checking and reporting arrangement.
Quality Controls are the detailed processes use to demonstrate the project is meeting its performance; they include detailed checking procedures such as sample testing, peer reviews, inspections, and testing and trend analysis. These are applied to the products of the projects to identifying non conforming items.
The difference between these three elements if that Quality Assurance is the responsibility of the organisation, Quality Planning is the responsibility of the project management teams and Quality Control is implemented by the project management team.
Effective quality management is vital to ensure that the project meets its quality objectives, quality is the most difficult to the three objective (time, cost and quality) to measure and control.