ABSTRACT
Quality assurance (QA) is a planning and management process which assures the assessment is of a specified quality. Quality assurance is how makes sure the job is being done well, while validation and peer review are how one finds out afterward if it was done well. Quality assurance can extend beyond the assessment itself in the form of records management to assure the protection, retrievability, and possibly replicability of the data. Quality assurance comes from production systems where the product was a piece of hardware and QA involved production quality control, acceptance testing, and product inspection. Evidence from a QA program may be equally useful in environmental or consumer product litigation which may result from decisions based in part on risk assessments. Quality assurance includes scientific and technical procedures and administrative procedures. For risk assessments, technical QA procedures generally formalize what might otherwise be called “good practice.”.
