While looking over some presentations of new software projects/companies, it was hard to ignore the fact that some of them had missing major functionalities or even worse, the investors were pointing out some showstopper bugs. I’m talking about new companies, young ones, that probably got already a round of investment.

Other thing I noticed was that some companies, after 6 to 12 months after their initial investment, end up drowning in bugs and refactorings which are causing dev work to hinder and not develop new features as planned. Those missing features are often the reason of a failed second investment round.

Of course, these are the worse case scenarios and it’s not happening for ALL the startups. It’s not something I wish, it’s just something that I see everyday. All the major sources specify the same kindof news: “About 90% of startups fail. 10% of startups fail within the first year. Across all industries, startup failure rates seem to be close to the same. Failure is most common for startups during years two through five, with 70% falling into this category.”

Identifying this problem, I took the role of the CTO for a testing company. The main goal is to help start-ups building quality work. This is what it matters, because others success is our success. Our role is to bring expertise and fresh perspective to projects, contributing to the overall improvement of software quality within an organization.

So, how important is QA for you, and when do you decide it’s time to invest in it? Have you seen good ideas not getting investment because of bad quality? How is anybody overcoming this?

  • Mission-Jellyfish-53BEnglish
    1·
    11 months ago

    I don’t think you’re wrong about the importance of QA. But not in early-stage startups when speed is the most important thing. We didn’t have ANY tests written before raising our (pre)seed round and expanding to another market.

    Then, development slowed down, it took 30% more time to launch new features and test them (which is an eternity in startup world.)

    I never had ANY investor ask me if we’re writing tests, what does our QA look like, how are we ensuring product quality. What ALL of them asked is - what’s your churn. If the churn is high, then there is something wrong with the product (wrong features, bad UX).

    I don’t know what you do exactly, I just commented because of the round sentence, but I don’t think early-stage startups are your best target group. :) Except for maybe fintect, healtech, industries with big consequences if something goes wrong. I imagine QA is more important for them than for random SaaS tools.

    • bhooo121OPBEnglish
      1·
      11 months ago

      First, thank you. You raised some very interesting points here.

      You are right about investors. They never ask about testing, but honestly, they don’t ask about programming languages neither. Or if your backend is using sql or nosql. They want things done. They are usually non-technical and they don’t want to get into these kind of details.

      Or product is not just testing for bugs. Or main focus is to create a mindset inside the young organization, that keeps testing on the table. We try to ensure that each stage of software development aligns with the quality standards. We push for Agile and DevOps. We try to be the end user advocate and raise potential business issues. We try to find defects earlier in development because it’s much cheaper than finding them in production.

      And no, all of the above is not taking more time. QA doesn’t mean loooong development time, loooong processes and loooong time to market.

      You’re also right about the numbers. Those statistics are not all about bad product.