Software Testing : A Challenge for Start Ups ?
Quality Assurance is one of the important yet less hyped work function in the software industry. No one feels the need for it until they come across a quality disaster that would have been easily avoided by having proper testing resources in place, and to this - our STARTUPS are no exception.
India currently houses the world’s third largest startup ecosystem, with 38 firms being valued at over $1 billion, or what is known as unicorns. In 2020, the country minted around 12 such unicorns despite the disruption to the economy caused by the Covid-19 pandemic. And today, just four months into 2021, India already has 10 new unicorns.
So you think “Quality Assurance” plays any role in making these startups a “Unicorn” ?. And if yes, in what sense ?.
Well for me, The answer is YES and in what sense, let’s find out.
Being associated with one such Unicorn for a longer time and seeing the way it has grown, I can surely say that Engineering can never be completed without having a proper Quality Assurance. Software Development is like a bullock cart - where two wheels are the development and quality teams and the bulls in the front are the teams driving them (Eg: Product, Support and Senior Management). No matter how much ever strength you put in front, if the two wheels are not in sync, you will feel troubled in reaching the destination.
So what are these challenges that a start up faces before growing and becoming a Unicorn and how quality assurance overcomes those easily, let’s start with 1st and important one.
- Ensuring Functional Quality
You grow when your clients grow and our clients will grow, only if they have a functionally working product to use. It’s ok if a software is doing or not doing something what its not supposed to do, but it’s very important that it should do what it is meant to do. Functional Testing being one of the primary and major leg of quality process always ensures that your product is aligned with what your clients demand.
Product Teams can help you with what clients want, Development teams can help you develop a software depending on what product teams specified, but it is Quality Team that validates and ensures that things are in place w.r.t what has come from product and what is being shipped by development team to clients. Imagine the scenario when this validation is not present - CHAOS!
2. Ensuring Usability and Stability
Competitive markets have not only made software products to be proficient functionally but also enthral customers by having a superbly designed UX backed by a strong stability index. A working product can get you 2–3 stars on app-store or play-store, but to reach 5 stars, you definitely need to make it attractive and easy to use with effective robustness qualities.
Many start up ideas fail not because they were not good, but only because they could not live up to the demanding expectations of the market. Todays user is more reliable in believing in product only if they look visibly perfect and not just by their properly working function.
3. Scale and Perform
Well, If you cannot Scale, you cannot do Sale.
Todays world is all about TPMs (Transactions Per Minute) and TPS (Transactions Per Second). Growing user bases called for a demand of serving high volumes in an effective and efficient manner to which our start ups are no exceptions. Earlier, a large scale company would face such challenge at a very latter stage in the growth cycle. But today, tables have turned around and more focus is on reaching more and more users which caused due to a super spiked growth and demand in mobile technology.
So it became important for startups to buckle up their seats and board this super fast plane to reach the users on time.
4. Process and Strategies
A software development model is as good as its quality assuring process. Theres no point in shipping products if they lack quality. Testing strategies evolve the development process by verifying and validating each and every step of the development model thereby ensuring the effective delivery of the product.
As we know that the cost of fixing bugs at a later stage in development is huge and it impacts timelines, verifying and validating things at every point erodes all these complexities and shapes a best way to ship the product to market.
So these are some of the important pointers which I feel played a major role in getting that paradigm shift and take the product to next level.
After contributing to one of the Unicorn of 2021, I am already on my way to carve the quality path for another one in coming years. So keep reading and Happy Testing !
