In the rush to ship product, founders often treat quality as an afterthought. You write the code, you click the button once to see if it works, and you deploy. This works for a hobby project. For a business, it is a recipe for disaster. One major bug can wipe out your database or expose customer credit cards. To prevent this, you need Quality Assurance.
Quality Assurance (QA) is the maintenance of a desired level of quality in a service or product. It is often confused with “testing,” but it is broader. Testing is the act of finding bugs. QA is the process of preventing them.
For a startup, QA is the immune system. It attacks the defects before they can infect the user base. Without it, you are vulnerable to catastrophic failure every time you update your software.
The Conflict of Interest
#A fundamental rule of software development is that you should never QA your own work.
When a developer writes code, they have a mental model of how it “should” work. When they test it, they subconsciously follow the “happy path”—the sequence of clicks that leads to success. They rarely test the edge cases.
A QA engineer has a different mindset. Their job is to break things. They try to enter a negative number in the quantity field. They try to upload a 5 gigabyte file when the limit is 5 megabytes. You need this adversarial relationship to find the weak points.
Manual vs. Automated QA
#In the early days, QA is manual. The founder or a dedicated tester clicks through the app on every device before a release. This is slow but thorough for user experience issues.
As you scale, manual QA becomes a bottleneck. You cannot manually test a million lines of code every week. You must shift to Automated QA.
This involves writing scripts that test the software automatically.
- Unit Tests: Check individual functions.
- Integration Tests: Check how functions work together.
- End-to-End Tests: Simulate a user walking through the entire flow.
Automated tests run every time a developer saves code. If a test fails, the system blocks the deployment. This acts as a safety net that allows you to move fast without breaking things.
The Cost of Quality
#There is a trade-off. QA costs time and money. Writing tests takes almost as long as writing the feature itself.
Founders often ask: “Can we skip QA this time to hit the deadline?”
The answer depends on the cost of failure. If you are launching a social media app and a photo fails to load, the cost is low. If you are launching a fintech app and a transfer fails, the cost is infinite. You lose trust instantly.
Quality as Culture
#QA is not just a department. It is a culture.
If developers are allowed to ship sloppy code because “QA will catch it,” you have a broken culture. Developers must be responsible for quality. QA should be the final gatekeeper, not the janitor cleaning up the mess.
You want a culture where breaking the build is a learning moment, not a punishable offense, but where shipping known bugs is unacceptable.