Software Quality Assurance Process: A Consolidated Definition and a Lifecycle-Mapped Taxonomy of Tool Support

Software quality assurance (SQA) continues to suffer from persistent terminological confusion. Organizations and practitioners routinely use quality assurance (QA), quality control (QC), and testing as if they were synonyms, even though international standards treat them as distinct functions. A second problem compounds the first: tool support for each activity is scattered across vendor categories rather than organized by engineering purpose, so it rarely lines up cleanly with the software development lifecycle (SDLC). This paper tackles that fragmentation through a structured narrative review. Authoritative sources - IEEE Std 730, IEEE Std 1028, IEEE Std 829, ISO/IEC 25010, the SWEBOK Guide, and seminal texts by Sommerville, Pressman, and Myers - were analyzed alongside recent comparative work on quality in agile and maturity-model contexts, and alongside a supplementary search of recent (2019-2025) peer-reviewed literature on tool taxonomies and DevOps quality practice; a definitional synthesis was built by pulling out the elements that stayed invariant across the standards. Two results come out of the review: a consolidated working definition of the SQA process that separates its managerial, process-facing core from quality control's product-facing activities, and a two-dimensional taxonomy mapping QA tool support (requirements management and traceability, structured review support, static analysis, unit and system test automation, continuous integration, code coverage measurement, defect/error tracking, and configuration management) across both the SDLC phase in which each tool operates and the QA function it serves (prevention, appraisal, or detection). This paper concludes that engineering teams get more out of their tooling, and adopt it more effectively, when selection is driven by this lifecycle mapping rather than by vendor categorization alone. Future work will empirically validate the taxonomy on FraudShield, a real-time financial fraud-detection system currently under development, and will survey current tool coverage against the taxonomy in the Nigerian software industry.