Quality Assurance

1.The concept of quality can be described as anything that meets costumer's expectations and therefore, makes him satisfied with a particular product. Besides the customer's requirements, quality also depends on product's price. To be more specific, product of high quality does not necessarily have to be expensive as long as it satisfies the customer. To conclude, rather than considering quality as absolute, a relative concept would be more accurate.

2. Quality control can be defined as a control "based on inspection of the product or a sample of products."

3.Quality control has three stages that help make it effective. The stages are the following: prevention, inspection and correction and improvement.
a) prevention: the main role of the first stage is to improve products and fix or remove imperfections. It makes sure that design of the product makes customer's expectations.
b) inspection: it used to be the most expensive stage as it requires high costs. Therefore, instead of hiring inspectors, many companies started to use total quality management.
c) correction and improvements: in the last stage correcting the faulty products as well as the actual process takes place. The main idea is to avoid these problems in the future.

4. One of the possible weaknesses of inspecting for quality is bias. In other words, the main focus of the inspectors on the work of workers is find their mistakes or problems. Hence, it already has a negative and biased approach. Another weakness is that since it is inspectors' responsibility to control the quality of a specific product, the work often do not try as hard to make quality product because they it is going be checked again anyway. Finally, it might be very time consuming to not only identify the fault of a product, but to also fix it. Especially, when the product passes through several stages of production.