Quality assurance

1. All actions taken to ensure that standards and procedures are adhered to and that delivered products or services meet performance requirements.

2. The planned systematic activities necessary to ensure that a component, module, or system conforms to established technical requirements.

3. The policy, procedures, and systematic actions established in an enterprise for the purpose of providing and maintaining a specified degree of confidence in data integrity and accuracy throughout the lifecycle of the data, which includes input, update[?], manipulation, and output.

Source: from Federal Standard 1037C and from MIL-STD-188

This is also the meaning in software engineering.

See Also

Software engineering Software testing