It may seem that in the 21st century, end users don’t have to think about software quality and face any significant issues with it – today, teams working on applications, web services, and websites are aimed at not only minimizing the number of bugs in their solutions but also providing the audience with a top-notch user experience. However, if we talk about launching solutions based on an unidentified business model, the things may be different: as for them every day counts, the stage of quality assurance (QA) may not be a priority, and this may consequently affect the loyalty of the product’s target audience in a bad way. Below, we will analyze this problem in more detail.
The Problem and The Solution
So, what to do? How to ensure that the resulting solution will conquer its users and beat possible competitors? Let’s find it out right now.
As you may know, the QA stage implies tailoring the solution to a list of specifications (technical, non-technical, and business requirements aligned with stakeholders). Usually, they are determined at the very beginning of startup product development. However, due to the ideology of a software startup as such, these requirements may be incomplete, presented in different (most often – inconvenient) formats, and need to be expanded or changed over time.
In this regard, the task of QA specialists working on startup software can be much more global than in the case of dealing with projects in which the specifications are clear and known initially, and the entire project is completed with detailed documentation, which can be completely covered with test cases. In particular, they will have to deal with either a complete lack of documentation or drafts brought together by engineers, analysts, architects, designers, and other team members. In this case, writing test cases can be a real challenge and require special expertise from a QA engineer, namely, skills of a system analyst.
Moreover, software development for startups is often accompanied by a complete lack of a release cycle, and QA tasks can be carried out only at the production stage. This means that in this short period, the QA specialist will need to have enough time to eliminate not only major bugs (those that cause the product to stop working altogether) but also bugs with a lower priority.
Finally, it is essential to understand that web application development Chicago has to sacrifice time on testing to be able to launch the full-fledged project before its competitors. Thus, in the shortest possible time, testing and quality assurance specialists should cope with their work no worse than what would happen in a large corporation, with a well-functioning life cycle built according to all the rules of the Agile methodology.
A completely different question is where to find such a specialist. The fact is that some middles, and especially juniors, do not have the necessary analytical thinking that would allow them to cope with the task to provide the target audience with a working product as fast as possible. That is why, in many cases, it makes sense to resort to outsourcing so that the hired company that provides software design services would also be able to find you a specialist with software development startup experience specifically in your business niche.
Final Thoughts
We hope that we have helped you understand the importance of choosing the right approach to the testing and QA stage in startup software development, and now, you will pay special attention to it. If you are looking for specialists who will take responsibility for quality assurance or for the implementation of the entire life cycle of your software for startups, feel free to contact us.
