Working out when to hire QA testers is a challenge for any startup. Hire too early and you risk spending your limited cash on quality assurance before it’s necessary. Hire too late and there’s an even bigger risk — a risk of releasing buggy software that repels users and hurts retention.
With this in mind, at what stage should you start to consider hiring QA testers?
Below, we’ve put together a brief guide explaining when you should start to look into creating a QA team for your technology business.
Understanding How Crucial QA Is to Your Product
Quality matters, but not always equally.
While some products — a social network or chat app, for example — can survive without a complete QA process for some of time, apps that handle large amounts of sensitive user data need thorough QA from early in the development process.
Before you rush into hiring QA testers (or leave it too late, if your product thoroughly depends on quality), ask yourself: How crucial is QA to your product?
If quality is essential, right from the early days of development, start the testing and bug fixing process as early as possible.
From Idea to Minimum Viable Product
When your product is in the idea stage, quality assurance is usually an unnecessary cost. If you have a limited amount of capital to put towards developing your product from idea to MVP, don’t focus too strongly on quality assurance at this point in the process.
Instead, apply QA in broad strokes.
At this point, quality assurance exists to help you realize the best way to go about things and turn around bad ideas as quickly as possible. Used moderately, QA can help you develop your MVP in the right direction for a faster, smoother build process.
Don’t obsess over QA at this point in the process. Instead, use it to prove that your product is feasible, all while discovering issues that could affect development so that you can avoid them as you move forward.
During the Alpha and Beta Stages of Your Product
This is when QA starts to become more important. Since you’re no longer creating a product for your internal use — at this point, you’re focused on creating a working product for investors — it’s more important to begin to bring QA testing into the development process.
At this point, QA is about finding bugs in your application’s design and structure. Testing is done at a source code level to uncover bugs and issues that could hold your application back as you move forward throughout its development.
If you plan to present your product to investors, this is also a great time to start testing to ensure it’s ready for demonstration. A problem-free technology demo shows prospective investors that you’re serious about building a high quality product.
As your product moves into the beta stage of development, QA testing helps you uncover bugs before your earliest customers. This gives you much more information to fix major bugs in your application before they can negatively affect your beta and initial post-launch customers.
Before and Shortly After You Launch Your Product
At this point, QA testing becomes crucial. Your QA testing process should focus on testing that your application is ready to launch. It should also help you understand the risks associated with each bug that affects your application, and the potential costs of these risks.
After you launch your product, QA testing becomes a process of finding bugs and carrying out thorough testing to ensure a smooth, bug-free, user friendly experience. After all, the bugs you have to fix at this point have real consequences for your reputation and ability to retain users.
Do You Need a QA Testing Team?
There’s no perfect moment to bring QA testers into your development process.
Some products require a lot of attention to QA right from the beginning of development, while others can get by with a test process that begins at a relatively late stage.
You may find that a crowdtesting platform lets you access a huge audience of testers at a relatively low cost. From bug hunting to functional testing, you can begin the testing process early without the prohibitive cost of building an in-house QA team.
