Final answer:
Quality assurance is essential in ensuring that all quality requirements are met throughout the entire product lifecycle, from design to post-market surveillance.
Step-by-step explanation:
Quality assurance (QA) encompasses activities that are aimed at providing confidence that quality requirements are fulfilled throughout the entire product lifecycle. This includes developing, implementing, and maintaining methods, operation sequences, and processes starting from the design phase to manufacturing, and extending to the final assembly and post-market surveillance. During the product development process, engineers focus on various attributes of the product to ensure it meets the intended quality standards and consumer needs. Inadequate testing of prototypes can lead to overlooking important design flaws that could affect quality. Therefore, rigorous testing and refinement are essential steps to evaluate the quality of a design.
Products are engineered with the intent not only to satisfy consumers but also to meet the requirements of regulators, assembly line workers, parts suppliers, and more. As such, QA is critical in ensuring that all these perspectives are addressed. It is key to interface with designers, research engineers, manufacturing engineers, and quality in the testing of raw materials, prototypes, and pre-production samples for successful manufacturing process implementation and production hand-off. Defining, tracking, and executing testing deliverables are also necessary to ensure that the manufacturing meets the defined quality standards.