When you manufacture the physical widget, manufacturing tolerances mean that not every widget is the same. There are variations in the as-produced widgets.
You need a QA/QC process to identify units which are too far out of tolerance and either remove them from the pipeline or remediate them. You also need to track trends in the measured tolerances to proactively fix your production equipment.
In the software world, that’s trivially easy. Your CI pipe publishes an artifact and then every user gets a bit-perfect copy of that artifact. Your entire QC is just: Users compare the artifact’s checksum to the expected checksum. It essentially always matches because we use things like TCP to copy the data.
The type of QA you’re talking about is also required for physical widgets.
Parent means quality control in the context of the supply chain.
Still wrong imho, since you need to at least maintain a zip file in someone's CDN, and those folks have to maintain their CDN QoS.
I'm not sure exactly what you mean by this, as a large part of software development is QA testing, and validation. Which is a form of quality control.