Definition
QA (quality assurance) covers the activities and processes in software engineering meant to prevent defects and assure product quality — testing, reviews, acceptance criteria — as well as the role or team that carries this responsibility.
How it works
In traditional software teams QA is a separate role and phase; in discussions of AI-assisted development and AI-native organizations, that boundary is shrinking, with testing and verification increasingly done by developers themselves plus automated tooling.
Usage and context
In Weekly #001, QA is used in the job-role sense: discussing AI-native organizations, Guizang argued that if you call yourself AI-native but are still divided into traditional roles — design, front-end, QA, then back-end — you do not count, since everyone should be full-stack. The QA here is quality assurance, not question answering (Q&A).
Related and confusable terms
The most common confusion is QA versus Q&A (question answering): the former is quality assurance, the latter asking and answering questions. In AI contexts, “run a QA with the model” meaning to ask it questions uses the Q&A sense, which differs from the software quality-assurance meaning of this entry; context decides.