What procedure is used to ensure a product meets specified criteria regarding quality and reliability?

The procedure that is designed to ensure a product meets specified criteria regarding quality and reliability is quality assurance. This process involves systematic activities implemented in a quality system so that quality requirements for a product or service will be fulfilled.

Quality assurance focuses on the entire process of development and production, aiming to improve and stabilize production and associated processes to avoid or minimize issues that lead to defects. It is proactive in nature, ensuring that processes are in place to establish confidence in the quality of the product being developed.

In contrast, other concepts like quality control, quality analysis, and quality evaluation focus more on inspection or assessment after the fact, rather than establishing a systematic approach to prevent quality issues from arising in the first place. Quality control, for example, is primarily concerned with measuring and monitoring outputs to meet specified standards, while quality evaluation would involve assessing the quality of a product after it has been produced. Quality analysis might refer to examining data related to quality to inform improvements but does not encapsulate the structured preventive measures indicated in quality assurance.