Is Your QA Process Nonexistent?

Let's be honest - if you're reading this, there's a good chance your QA (Quality Assurance) process is either missing entirely or consists of "click around and hope nothing breaks." You're not alone, and the good news is that even basic QA can save you from expensive disasters.

Here's the brutal truth: your users have zero patience for buggy software. They'll give you exactly one chance to make a first impression. If that impression is "this thing is broken," they're gone forever.

What QA Actually Does

Think of QA as your product's bodyguard, standing between your code and your users. It's a way to make sure your product does what it's supposed to do, when it's supposed to do it, for every single user.

Good QA starts with thinking like a user, not like the person who built the thing. Users will:

• Enter phone numbers in email fields
• Upload huge images where you expected small profile photos
• Click the same button seventeen times in a row
• Try to create accounts with "test@test"

Your job is to anticipate this chaos and make sure your product handles it gracefully.

The Real Cost of Skipping QA

A bug found during development takes about 1 hour to fix. The same bug found during testing takes 3 hours. But a bug found in production? That's 10+ hours plus angry customers.

Here's the math: if you're paying a developer $100/hour, that "simple" bug costs you $100 caught early versus $1,000+ caught in production. Companies with strong QA processes move fastest because they're not constantly firefighting preventable problems.

Your Minimum Viable QA Process

If you're a solo founder: You handle both development and QA. Write down what each feature should do before you build it, then test your own work on different devices and browsers.

If you have a co-founder team: Your non-technical founder should handle QA. They'll test like users, not developers, which is exactly what you need.

Essential steps for every feature:

1. Write down what success looks like before you build anything
2. Test the happy path (what users should do)
3. Test the unhappy path (what users might accidentally do)
4. Make sure error messages actually help people
5. Check that it works on mobile and desktop

Start With Your Most Critical Flow

Pick your most important user journey - usually registration and login. Write down exactly what should happen at each step, then test both the right way and the wrong way to do it.

Example test cases for user registration:

• Valid email and password → account created, confirmation sent
• Invalid email → helpful error message shown
• Password too short → clear requirements displayed
• Email already exists → friendly message with login option

Simple Quality Checks Anyone Can Do

Before every release:

• Can new users sign up and log in?
• Do the main features work without errors?
• Are error messages helpful instead of confusing?
• Does everything work on mobile?
• Can existing users still access their data?

Tools that make QA easier:

• Hotjar to see how users actually interact with your product
• Marker.io for visual bug reporting - stop trying to explain bugs over Slack and let anyone on your team capture screenshots, record videos, and report bugs directly from your website
• Basic checklists to ensure consistency
• Friends and family as volunteer testers (they'll find things you miss)

Your Next Steps

1. Start with your most critical user flow
2. Write down what should happen at each step
3. Test both the right way and wrong way to use each feature
4. Create a simple checklist you can follow before every release
5. Ask someone who didn't build the feature to test it

Quality isn't about perfection - it's about catching the obvious problems before your users do. Even a basic QA process will put you ahead of most startups who ship first and debug later.

Remember: it's always cheaper to prevent problems than to fix them after launch. Your users will thank you, your developers will be happier, and your business will run smoother.

Want the complete playbook? Check out our detailed QA implementation guide for step-by-step processes, templates, and real-world examples.

Coming Next Week:

From Developer to CTO - Why great developers don't always make great managers.

At Keiboarder, we help startups to Fortune 500 companies avoid costly software development mistakes with expert fractional CTO leadership, a clear roadmap, and a proven process to build and scale market-ready products. Get in touch with us, and let's build awesome things together! 🚀 Contact us