QA
Abbreviation with 3 meanings
| Stands for | Quality assurance (software) |
|---|---|
| Meanings | 3 |
| Categories | Technology & Computing, Geography & Places |
QA has three meanings. The most common are Quality assurance (software) (programming) and Qatar (country code); it can also stand for Question answering.
Meanings of QA at a glance
| # | QA stands for | Context |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Quality assurance (software) | Technology & Computing › Programming |
| 2 | Qatar | Geography & Places › Country Code |
| 3 | Question answering | Technology & Computing › Artificial Intelligence |
1. Quality assurance (software)
Technology & Computing · Programming Abbreviations · also used in business
The discipline and team responsible for preventing defects and verifying that software meets requirements, through test planning, manual and automated testing, and process reviews. QA engineers or testers check releases before they reach users.
Example: The build is with QA until Thursday; don't merge anything else into the release branch.
Strictly, quality assurance covers the processes that prevent defects, while quality control and testing find them, but software teams use "QA" loosely for all three. SDET (software development engineer in test) is a related title for engineers who write test automation. In natural language processing, QA instead refers to question answering systems.
2. Qatar
Geography & Places · Country Code Abbreviations
Gulf peninsula state with Doha as its capital and QAT as its alpha-3 code, one of the world's largest exporters of liquefied natural gas. Qatar hosted the 2022 FIFA World Cup, the first held in the Arab world and the first played in November and December.
Example: Al Jazeera's headquarters in Doha, QA broadcasts in Arabic and English.
In business QA almost always means quality assurance, so country fields should be labeled. The Qatari riyal (QAR) is pegged to the US dollar.
3. Question answering
Technology & Computing · Artificial Intelligence Abbreviations
An NLP task in which a system answers questions posed in natural language, either by extracting a span from a given passage or by generating an answer from its knowledge or retrieved documents.
Example: The QA model answers "When does the warranty expire?" by quoting the right line of the contract.
Benchmarks include Stanford's SQuAD (2016) and Google's Natural Questions. IBM Watson's 2011 Jeopardy! victory was a landmark QA system, and retrieval-augmented generation is now a common design for open-domain QA. In software teams, QA means quality assurance.
Related abbreviations
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