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Ask HN: How do you handle QA at a startup with no QA team? Genuinely curious

4 points by ovi_firstqa ↗ HN
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.

12 comments

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ativzzz
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.

gary4gar
Everyone does QA at a startup. There is no dedicated QA. If you're a developer, you're doing QA. Product, whatever your job title is, you're doing QA.
kypro
Why though?

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?

spacesh1psoda
I guess usually using things like sentry or having a close conversation with customers.
journal
QA should not be done by the same entity writing code.
denn-gubsky
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.