Software quality engineering (SQE)
Software quality engineering (SQE) is the discipline of building software quality into a system as an engineered, measured property, rather than treating it as something inspected for after the fact.
Where quality assurance (QA) is usually described as a process discipline – the standards, gates, and reviews that govern how software is built – SQE applies engineering rigor to quality itself, turning quality attributes into measurable objectives, and using metrics, tooling, and automation to engineer toward them across the lifecycle.
NASA’s Software Assurance Standard reflects this distinction, naming quality assurance and quality engineering as two separate disciplines that both contribute evidence to software assurance.
In practice the two overlap heavily and the same people often do both.