Software Testing Blog

I still remember when the last dot com bubble burst. I was a young QA engineer in a high-profile start-up with millions of users/downloads, but no real business model.  One day, my manager called me to her office and told me that, due to the status of the internet economy, layoffs were forthcoming. Naturally, I figured that I would be the one getting “down-sized”, but this was not the case. Turns out, it was my QA manager (and 50% of all staff) that got let go.

Suddenly, a QA department of 8 people had been chopped down to 2 – what now? How would we be able to assure product quality with only 25% of the working power? Would we release less functionality? Or would we work more than 14 hours a day? Ha!

I learned a lot during these busy 12 months, and the layoffs proved to be a blessing in disguise. When you have so much to do and so little manpower, you learn the essence of creativity.  You learn to focus on the most important matters – almost by instinct – when time is not on your side.  I can’t say that what we did conformed to the “software testing rule book”, but we somehow found a way to continue releasing cool products with reasonable quality standards.

Knowing that we wouldn’t be able to identify and fix all the problems, we focused on making sure the common functionality of the product was working properly. Yet in one memorable instance, we paid the price of poor quality. Due to performance issues, one of our applications had been widely rejected by users, prompting the company to kill a product that had consumed nearly five years of manpower. The company’s main product, from there on out, would receive nearly all of our attention.

The experience had taught me a lot about the relationship between business and software – mainly, that they cannot be separated. They’re linked together, for better or worse, whether we like it or not. Perhaps you’ve had similar experience, or perhaps you’re about to.  In either case, here are five survival tactics to keep in mind when you’re working for a “starving start-up”:

1. Release new functionality frequently – Your end user could care less about your development resource problems.  Releasing new functionality should be the #1 goal, so develop short iterations and deploy a new version at least once a month.
2. Take risks – There is no chance of testing your application on all the supported configurations. Choose the most common ones (1-2 OS, 1-2 Browsers) and test only on those.
3. Product management – It’s very tempting to cut out aspects of the development process that are NOT related to actual coding. Especially in hard times, it’s important to build the product right, but it’s even more critical to build the right product.
4. Beta Testing – Get your environment to provide any feedback on your new product. You’ll be surprised how a fresh set of eyes can identify problems you didn’t notice.
5. Be responsive – Listen carefully to end user feedback once you deploy a new version. This will help you  better understand if the new functionality was adopted as expected (usability wise) and that there are no catastrophes. It’s critical to monitor the post-release bugs and learn from those mistakes. Since you’re short on time and resources, it is highly important to optimize the people who you do have on-hand.

Anyone who earns a living in the field of software testing – whether veteran or novice – has probably faced (or is facing) similiar circumstances. If so, what are your QA survival tactics?