MSA analyzes the collection of equipment, operations, procedures, software and personnel that affects the assignment of a number to a measurement characteristic.
An introduction to MSA can be found in chapter 8 of Doug Montgomery's Quality Control book.
[4] Advanced procedures for designing MSA studies can be found in Burdick et al. [5] Equipment: measuring instrument, calibration, fixturing.
These can be plotted in a "fishbone" Ishikawa diagram to help identify potential sources of measurement variation.
The goals of a MSA are: The ASTM has several procedures for evaluating measurement systems and test methods, including: The American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) has several procedures and reports targeted at task-specific uncertainty budgeting and methods for utilizing those uncertainty estimates when evaluating the measurand for compliance to specification.