Companies that are small or just getting started often don’t have a dedicated staff for doing Quality Assurance. This doesn’t mean that you have to release buggy applications. There are a few things that you can do to provide some basic QA that will benefit your product.
Pay Attention
The number one thing you can do while developing a product is to pay attention. Developers should always have some level of UX going on in the back of their mind while they’re building and validating their work.
- Does this click process make sense?
- Did that interactivity work as I expected?
- Should this error appear at this time?
Throw in some Bad Data
Occasionally add some bad data and make sure that your product acts as you expect.
- Put in a name instead of an email address.
- Add an email address instead of a street address.
- Skip fields that you “know” are required.
Dogfood
You should be using your own product. The best way to do basic QA on a product is to actually use it. When you are developing, you’re focused on a specific feature or behavior. When you are a user it gives you the opportunity to see the product as a whole and validate that the overall user experience is a good one.
This also lets your entire company (Founder/CEO down) experience the product and identify bugs.
Report
Identifying bugs is only half of the problem. You still need to report and track them and unless that process is easy it won’t get done. Developers won’t want to break out of their current thought processes and change contexts to a ticketing system to enter a bug report while they’re working.
With QAtab, you can make it easy to capture those bugs as their noticed and have them automatically feed into your ticketing system for further triage. This greatly reduces the friction for capturing bugs and provides a very effective solution for providing a basic level of quality assurance without a dedicated QA team.