Can your startup afford to be known as a company that’s happy to sacrifice quality for stronger profit margins or faster results? When you’re building a Minimal Viable Product (MVP), learning about customers is king and speed matters. But when you are becoming a more mature company, quality and stability starts to matter more — today, even Facebook’s iconic and hacker-inspired ‘move fast and break things’ motto has long been abandoned.
QA testing is one of the most important aspects of any business and it’s of particular importance for startups. Whether you are a rapidly growing underdog in your industry or becoming increasingly established, it’s important to be more than just another choice, but to be the best option.
Despite its importance, quality assurance and QA testing is all too often seen by companies as a necessary evil – a cost, rather than an investment, that increases the time involved in shipping their latest application, product or service.
The key to consistently producing high quality, problem-free output, whether in the form of an application or a service, or even a marketing campaign, is to develop a culture of quality that runs through your company.
Below, we’ve listed three telling signs that your company lacks a culture of quality. If any of them sound familiar, consider meeting with other key stakeholders in your company to discuss your culture of quality and take the first steps towards building QA into all aspects of your organization.
Your startup’s founders and CEO rarely, if ever, discuss quality
When you’re part of a rapidly growing company, it’s easy to spend most of your time focusing on metrics like run rate or monthly revenue growth. After all, it’s essential that your organization is fully aware of where its revenue is coming from and how it’s growing.
However, many early stage companies build their entire culture around growth, forgetting that quality and as Paul Graham shares in his legendary post on why many startups fail, putting users first are the most important component of growth. Release criteria become focused on speed instead of quality and software that started its life as carefully optimized becomes buggy and frustrating.
Failing to focus on quality can cost your company far more than you may realize, since many of the customers that become frustrated with buggy software will leave for a competitor. This is a factor that makes QA testing so vital for SaaS firms which have to deal with user churn.
Even if growth is your top priority, it’s important to establish a culture of quality assurance and control. Quality assurance and growth are closely intertwined. When your company loses track of one factor, it’s easy for a slowdown in the other to follow.
Your company doesn’t have any quality vision, or has a weak QA vision
Does your organization have a commitment to deliver the highest possible quality product or service to its customers? If not, your company’s weak QA vision could be hurting the quality of its product, whether you’re building and growing a digital product, a physical product or providing a service.
It’s important that your organization has a quality assurance vision – a clear statement that explains its quality goals and objectives. Without one, it’s easy to let QA testing take a backseat to other factors that are more closely linked to short-term growth.
Your company can grow without a quality vision, but often, not for long. As your organization grows larger and serves a greater number of users and customers, establishing QA becomes more essential than ever. It also becomes more challenging and expensive to find and fix existing problems later on.
No matter how young your company might be, or how rapid its growth could become, it’s essential to establish a clear quality assurance vision right from the beginning, as it will play a crucial role in determining your organization’s focus on quality as it grows into an even bigger company.
Your company frequently experiences problems due to lack of quality
Does it seem like your team is constantly moving from one crisis to the next due to bugs and quality issues? Some technologies are notorious for releasing buggy software, to the point that each release seems to create more problems than the last.
While QA testing is often viewed as a cost, it’s actually an investment that produces significant savings for your company by eliminating the need to rush to fix bugs and other quality assurance issues after you’ve shipped your latest release your newest product.
Too often, QA takes a back seat and in some instances, the QA team is not even involved in the process until key applications have been deployed to SIT or UAT environments, says Armel Nene
CEO and Chief Software Architect of ETAPIX Global. From there, he comments, the game of tennis can be costly to both the company bottom line and time to market. Because of the lack of involvement of all team members, developers’ efforts will often shift to fixing bugs instead of writing new features.
If you frequently run into setbacks as a result of poor QA testing, even if they’re relatively minor, it’s important to establish clear QA testing practices. What begins as a minor fix every now and then can quickly develop into a series of serious problems as a result of a poor QA vision.
When you have to scramble to fix a bug, treat it as a learning experience with a clear lesson: an extra commitment to quality assurance can simplify the release process and significantly reduce costs, giving your team fewer crises to worry about and more time to focus on growing.
“Finally, we all assume quality means better, but better at what? This is especially true in the software industry where whole paradigms can shift in four or five years”, says Kelly Balthrop. “It’s even more critical that a software company innovate, experiment and get rapid feedback on those experiments to tailor a product to what the people want most.”
“Once you identify what quality means, you can make the case for why improving quality in that area is important. A good book I read recently is “The Lean Startup“, by Eric Ries. He talks a lot about the need for quality, and what that actually means to a startup.”
