Testing is essential; professional testers are optional.
Many companies believe they can skip hiring QA engineers and let developers or other job roles handle testing. While this approach might seem like a cost-saving decision, it often ignores hidden costs and ripple effects that ultimately lead to significantly higher expenses.
Note 1: Professional QA does not mean full-time QA! Qxf2 has crafted a customized, fractional-QA service exclusively for startups that do not want the commitment of hiring a full-time QA.
Poorly tested software can cause issues across the entire company. At Qxf2, we've seen this happen many times with our startup clients over the last 12 years. Without effective QA, these hidden problems add up quickly and create ripple effects that impact every team. From losing money to hurting team morale, ineffective testing creates significant challenges across the board. We've documented how poor testing impacts different roles and included anecdotes from Qxf2's experience.
Poor testing can lead to problems that even reach the CEO. Bugs hurt the company's reputation. The CEO spends time calming down unhappy clients and fixing expectations. This takes their focus away from important tasks like planning strategy, raising funds and finding new growth opportunities. Inside the company, different teams might blame each other for delays, failures and bugs. This creates conflict and distracts the CEO from growing the business.
From our experience at Qxf2: At one of our healthcare clients, a major upgrade was delayed by several months due to constant quality issues. The CEO had to spend countless hours on calls reassuring concerned clients. By introducing professional QA, the team identified and addressed critical gaps allowing the product to finally reach the market and freeing up the the CEO's time for strategic priorities.
Engineering leadership bears the brunt when testing is subpar. They face pressure from multiple directions. The C-suite demands explanations for delays. Other departments blame engineering for their problems. Disgruntled engineers grow frustrated with constant firefighting. When bugs aren't caught, engineering leadership has to switch from long-term planning to fixing immediate problems. They often have to explain what went wrong, which can be stressful. Engineers may quit due to frustration from heavy workloads, blame, or unclear processes. Replacing them becomes harder, and missed deadlines put even more pressure on the team.
From our experience at Qxf2: At one of our less successful engagements, developers were tasked with owning testing. Significant bugs appeared with nearly every deployment, frustrating the VP of engineering, whose role shifted to defending the team against finger-pointing. Constant firefighting eroded team morale and left no room for strategic improvements, trapping the VP in an endless loop of damage control. We learnt a lot about how to improve team ownership of testing from that experience and have since implemented our improved strategies at newer clients.
Developers are paid a lot, but without QA, they spend much of their time testing instead of creating new features. This isn't the best use of their time and skills. Constantly fixing bugs lowers their morale because they feel like they're always fighting fires instead of doing creative work. Worse still, developers testing well is often under-valued and under-appreciated.
From our experience at Qxf2: A machine learning team we worked with attempted to handle testing themselves but struggled to deploy a stable model that met real-world needs. The lack of proper testing also made it difficult for the team to evolve the model over time. When Qxf2 was introduced, we implemented an early version of our six-dimensional approach to AI/ML model testing. The relief in the team was immediate and noticeable. Developers felt like they were finally set up for success - they could focus on building and refining models while professional testers handled testing more effectively, freeing up their time and improving overall outcomes.
Without effective QA, customer support teams get flooded with complaints and questions. This leaves them with less time for other important tasks, like helping customers feel good about the product or improving how they provide support. If they don't trust the product, it's harder for them to help customers.
From our experience at Qxf2: At another of our healthcare clients, the customer support team was overwhelmed with complaints and queries. This constant firefighting left them with little time for proactive customer success activities. Introducing professional QA dramatically reduced the volume of issues, freeing up the team to focus on building stronger relationships and delivering better experiences. Check out their testimonial at the end of this page.
Bugs cause customers to leave, making it harder for the sales team to keep existing clients or close new deals. Salespeople often blame the engineering team for customer churn, which creates tension between departments.
From our experience at Qxf2: At a startup we worked with, live product demos were failing due to missing data in newly acquired datasets. This frustrated the sales team and led to finger-pointing at engineering. As technical QA engineers with specialized expertise, we identified the right tools for the problem - tools a developer unfamiliar with such solutions might not even know existed. Qxf2 stepped in to write data quality tests and created a simple tool that the sales team could easily run themselves. Complaints and finger-pointing reduced dramatically. This proactive approach not only improved demo reliability but also earned engineering the goodwill of sales.
Bugs make it harder to keep the product fun, useful and sticky. Instead of working on new features, the product owner has to focus on fixing problems. This slows down the product's success and growth. Getting meaningful user feedback on new features becomes harder too, as users often focus on reporting other bugs and issues instead of the feature itself.
From our experience at Qxf2: A product owner at one of our engagments described us as the glue that brought clarity between teams. We often interacted with different roles to communicate risks, misses, gaps and loose ends. This helped reduce surprises and ensure smoother handoffs. This collaboration not only built trust but also helped the product owner make informed decisions that drove growth and engagement.
Bugs mess up project timelines. Deadlines become unclear, and the project manager has trouble tracking progress. This makes it harder to plan and share updates with others.
From our experience at Qxf2: Since we focus on working with early-stage products and startups, we don't have direct experience collaborating with project managers in most of our engagements. But this article would be incomplete if we didn't recognize their critical role in managing timelines and coordination. QA often indirectly supports their goals by improving predictability, visibility and reducing firefighting across teams.
Frequent bugs lead to constant alerts and emergency fixes. DevOps teams end up working late hours to support tight engineering timelines, which can cause burnout.
From our experience at Qxf2: At QA consultancy engagement, DevOps engineers borrowed some automated tests we had written to implement advanced application monitoring. This allowed them to gradually roll out changes with greater confidence. Additionally, Qxf2 collaborated with the DevOps team to write infrastructure tests that helped identify harder-to-detect infrastructure issues. This collaboration strengthened the relationship between DevOps and QA, ensuring a smoother deployment process and reducing production disruptions.
As a client services team member at a small startup software company, Qxf2 provided a much needed QA role for our team. Prior to having Arun and the Qxf2 team work with us, we did not have a formal QA process. Their ability to help us in client services understand the process and plan for deploys to our platform was critical to our continued success. We quickly went from regular post deploy bug fixes with emergency deploys to an environment where they have become extremely rare!I highly recommend the team at Qxf2 for a job well done, and commitment to excellence.
Katie Stauffer, Senior Manager, Client Services @ Pascal Metrics
Qxf2 has over a decade of experience helping startups build reliable, high-quality software. We specialize in tailored QA solutions that adapt to your team's unique needs, ensuring scalable and cost-effective results. By partnering with us, early-stage companies avoid costly pitfalls and gain access to professional testers who understand the challenges of startup growth. Let Qxf2 be your trusted QA partner. Just write to Arun ([email protected]) or drop a note .
This article was published in December 2024.
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