Ask HN: How do you handle QA at a startup with no QA team? Genuinely curious
Been doing QA for 19yrs, mostly at startups and still trying to figure out how are AI startups navigating the quality aspect nowadays, practically.
I'm also trying to productize my expertise and I see quite a lot of confusion among startups these days between: moving fast(whatever that means), quality, hitting PMF and/or growth.
I'm doing a lot of QA in my startups. There are several layers:
1. One model (Opus) writes a code, another model (Sonnet, Qwen, Kimi) writes unit tests using requirements and code;
2. Full code review by me. Just to understand what is going on in the codebase;
2. Integration tests are running with PlayWright MCP. Another model validates UI per requirements;
3. Substantive runtime tests prepared by me or human QA team. All features should be included into testing, plus regression testing of existing features, plus edge cases.
QA in AI era becomes more important than coding skills. So keep it in a good shape.
Everyone is QA at a startup. I hope y'all are using your own product regularly right? You should have a nice simple way to raise these issues, maybe a slack channel or something with a convenient way to turn a screenshot into an item in your todo/work system if you have one. Encourage product ownership.
Alternatively, if you don't really care about the product, everyone is also customer support at a startup - you should be quickly be able to solve regressions that customers raise. I hope that at least you are talking to your customers and are very responsive to them at a startup.
You'd be surprised. Every software application has bugs. If customers are willing to give you money despite bugs that's a very string signal in favour of your product.
Alternatively, if you don't really care about the product, everyone is also customer support at a startup - you should be quickly be able to solve regressions that customers raise. I hope that at least you are talking to your customers and are very responsive to them at a startup.
I guess I never understood this perspective because it's such an unproductive use of a developers or product person's time to be doing QA.
I guess everyone will use/test the product to some degree, but if you're trying to assure quality, isn't it better to have a dedicated QA?