Quality engineering

Quality engineering is the discipline of engineering concerned with the principles and practice of product and service quality assurance and control. In software development, it is the management, development, operation and maintenance of IT systems and enterprise architectures with a high quality standard. Quality engineering is the discipline of engineering that creates and implements strategies for quality assurance in product development and production as well as software development. Quality Engineers focus on optimizing product quality which W. Edwards Deming defined as: Quality engineering body of knowledge includes: Management and leadership The quality system Elements of a quality system Product and process design Classification of quality characteristics Design inputs and review Design verification Reliability and maintainability Product and process control Continuous improvement Quality control tools Quality management and planning tools Continuous improvement techniques Corrective action Preventive action Statistical process control (SPC) Risk management Auditor: Quality engineers may be responsible for auditing their own companies or their suppliers for compliance to international quality standards such as ISO9000 and AS9100. They may also be independent auditors under an auditing body. Process quality: Quality engineers may be tasked with value stream mapping and statistical process control to determine if a process is likely to produce defective product. They may create inspection plans and criteria to ensure defective parts are detected prior to completion. Supplier quality: Quality engineers may be responsible for auditing suppliers or performing root cause and corrective action at their facility or overseeing such activity to prevent the delivery of defective product. IT services are increasingly interlinked in workflows across platform boundaries, device and organisational boundaries, for example in cyber-physical systems, business-to-business workflows or when using cloud services.