Quality Assurance
3744·updated Aug 30, 2026The purpose of this function is to review the software project activities and to test the software products throughout their life cycle in order to determine if they are meeting the functional specifications of the users and are following the established plans, standards, and procedures to maintain a desired level of quality for a service or product.
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with different individuals or roles (e.g., quality assurance,the sentence this term was read in
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A systematic, process-oriented management function whose purpose is to provide confidence that defined quality requirements will be fulfilled — as NIST's CSRC glossary defines it (drawing from ISO 9000:2015) as "part of quality management focused on providing confidence that quality requirements will be fulfilled," cited in NIST SP 800-160v1r1. It is distinguished from quality *control* in that it is process-oriented and focuses on defect prevention, while quality control is product-oriented and focuses on defect identification. In information security and compliance contexts, it appears as an organizational role or activity — sitting alongside roles such as engineering, operations, and audit — that monitors processes, tests, and work products against defined standards to ensure consistent, reliable outcomes; in software and systems engineering this takes the form of monitoring all engineering processes, methods, and work products to ensure compliance against defined standards, including standards and procedures that managers, administrators, or developers use to review and audit products and activities.
Advisory only. A term this product ships is defined by an authority document, not by a search result.
Proposed during multiword review of this document in the CKI mapping queue.
Attested in
Classifications
Entity Type
Sensitivity
Information Class
Variants
- plural
- quality assurancesQuality Assurances
- possessive
- quality assurance'sQuality Assurance's
- pluralpossessive
- quality assurances'Quality Assurances'
Framework definitions
- §1
- The purpose of this function is to review the software project activities and to test the software products throughout their life cycle in order to determine if they are meeting the functional specifications of the users and are following the established plans, standards, and procedures to maintain a desired level of quality for a service or product.
- §1
- The purpose of this function is to review the software project activities and to test the software products throughout their life cycle in order to determine if they are meeting the functional specifications of the users and are following the established plans, standards, and procedures to maintain a desired level of quality for a service or product.
- §1 · attested_usage_reviewer_confirmed
- No definition is given in NIST SP 800-171r3. The term is attested in use at 1 citation in that document; a definition is pending curation.Increment 2: attested in 800-171r3 without a glossary definition.
- §1 · legacy_primary
- The purpose of this function is to review the software project activities and to test the software products throughout their life cycle in order to determine if they are meeting the functional specifications of the users and are following the established plans, standards, and procedures to maintain a desired level of quality for a service or product.DR-088 backfill from the noun definition column