A while back, I wrote about the approach and the attitude that the startups have towards Software Testing, and recommended to find that point in Software Development when testing becomes important in the scheme of things and to hire testers. Well, here I am again, talking about the same topic pretty much because I am hearing day-in and day-out sorry stories of Software Testing (or Quality Assurance as some companies would call it) being pushed to a corner with just one or two testers per team in startups, as the Startups Testing Strategy.
I had a chat with a QA head of a company which is presumably in the startup mode. I asked them how their day was, and they said “Pretty bad”. I asked “What’s wrong?” and they said “Everything is up in the air with no control. There are delays everywhere. Even though QA is doing their work on time, there are delays because development is not giving the fixes on time, the infrastructure people are not maintaining the pipelines correctly, and so on”. We continued the discussion and they agreed that QA cannot be handled by just one or two people for each team/project, and they have asked their management for more people.
Meanwhile, I saw a post in LinkedIn glorifying the concept of “We are all one team! There is no development and testing, we are all one”, while highlighting a whole bunch of functionalities from requirements to pipeline maintenance. Well, if you don’t have dedicated people with expertise in doing things in the team, how are you going to get anything done? Is this some kind of indoor game where people swap roles, keep smiling, be happy, and eat pancakes? This is Software Development for heavens-sake, working in a pressure cooker environment, where everything needs to get done quick, and you need to have expertise working on a dedicated basis to get things done! The real motivator of this ‘Quality Engineering’ business seems to be not improve the Quality, but make the testers work on things that they are not supposed to be working on.
Startups should start prioritizing hiring people with dedicated skills to get their product developed – be it business analysts, software testers, or the Ops. folks. Cutting short on skilled workers is not healthy for the workers, and business and the product in the long run. I think there should be pushbacks from many sides to stop this nightmare. Software Testers should not accept roles called ‘Quality Assistance’ or ‘Quality Engineering’ roles whose responsibilities are about providing tools and infra. support to the developers. That’s not what Software Testing is about. Venture Capital firms should assess whether startups are allocating skilled positions for required development and they should not approve funding if the necessary roles are not planned, budgeted, staffed, and appropriately used by startups. Software Testing leaders should come forward and talk about this menace so that it stops, because we need Quality software products among us as software is pervading our daily lives in so many ways. The Startups Testing Strategy should take care of that.