Quality assurance (QA) is essential for any SaaS startup or software company aiming to deliver reliable, bug-free products. The challenge many founders and managers run into is many services are designed for enterprise clients only, while having a limited offering for startups. What's worse, is you may not be able to find a cost-effective option that you can scale up and down as needed. Enter fractional QA, a new way to QA your startup's products without hiring a full-time team. Let's look deeper into how fractional QA can benefit your SaaS startup.
What is a fractional QA?
A fractional QA specialist, such as QAComet, manages your products' quality. You would hire a fractional QA based on a monthly retainer so you can spend less time worrying about problems with your products and instead focus on building and launching new features. With this setup, you can subscribe for a short period of time while your startup needs to improve your products. This could mean hiring a fractional QA before a round of funding or getting outside expertise on integrating QA as a culture within your company.
Why Choose Fractional QA for Software Companies and SaaS Startups?
This flexible and cost-effective solution lets you skip out on hiring a full-time QA, when it may not be needed, without letting your product's quality suffer. Not only that, but you benefit from
- Expertise on Demand: Whether it’s bug finding, test automation, usability testing, fractional QA brings specialized knowledge to your team.
- Cost-Effective: Hiring a full-time QA manager can strain your budget. With fractional QA you get access to seasoned professionals without a contract or long-term commitment.
- Agile and Scalable: Agility is crucial in SaaS. Using a fractional QA who can scale up or down is essential for any growing SaaS startup. Fractional QA adapts to your project cycles and is ready whenever you need it.
- Integrating with your team: Your product development team now has a quality superhero helping release better products. Our fractional QA experts play well with any team, helping with the planning, designing, and development phases of product development.
Some common QA anti-patterns found in SaaS startups
It is a common mistake to assume quality can be everyone's responsibility, but when this management anti-pattern is applied everyone loses. If you use this anti-pattern while building a startup, you're expecting engineers to release features quicker while also asking them to slow down and ensure the product works well. These conflicting constraints are difficult to maintain and often quality suffers as more features are released.
The main challenge is as more features are released bug surface area must be taken into account of. This quickly becomes an untenable mess and many founders find their team spending more time fighting fires than working on new features. We have all used buggy software and have left frustrated, but that's not an experience you want to leave with your customers. More bugs mean customers are more likely to churn, and this has ripple effects because of the reputational damage. This could hamper future growth and prevent fundraising from going as well as it should. Do you really want your company to leave quality behind? High-quality software helps differentiate yourself from the sea of other startups. Devoting serious artisanship towards your products can seriously help your startup succeed.
Responsibilities of a fractional QA
When you hire a fractional QA you're investing in
- Expert test engineering: Writing high-quality and flake-free tests is challenging, but having an expert helps your startup release software without testing headaches.
- AI-supercharged workflow: Now QAComet is special in that it's one of the few companies with an AI-augmented workflow. This helps our engineers write top-quality tests that follow best practices and are written at a faster rate than with a competitor's service.
- Usability expertise: Making sure your product's usability is streamlined and smooth is essential for any successful startup. Without it, your customers can be left frustrated and longing for an alternative.
- Agile managed QA: Keeping your startup lean is essential for extending life until the next round of funding and agile management is a best practice across the industry. By using a Shift-Left QA strategy, your team will catch problems much earlier in the development pipeline, before the first lines of code are written.
- Robust development infrastructure: Another facet of agile QA is having a robust CI setup. With continuous testing, your developer's work will automatically be tested whenever they make any changes to the codebase. Having a fractional QA with continuous testing expertise helps keep bugs from reaching production.
all while spending less than what you would on a full-time test-engineering team. Not only that, you're now saving time because you're no longer responsible for managing these folks. It's as simple as signing up for our service and letting our experts work with your team.
Why fractional QA is perfect for startups
Building a startup is hard, but managing a QA team shouldn't be. We've created an easy monthly package that lets founders stay focused on building their company instead of worrying about yet another fire they have to put out. Having QA as part of your product development pipeline will accelerate robust feature releases that your customers love. Instead of having to continuously go back and adjust features after releases, we make it possible to find the best possible UX workflows and aid your developers in releasing software that isn't riddled with bugs.