Ask HN: How do you handle QA at a startup with no QA team? Genuinely curious

4 points · 6 visible top comments · 2026-06-29 15:33:18 UTC

news.ycombinator.com · Read Story HN original

Been doing QA for 19yrs, mostly at startups and still trying to figure out how are AI startups navigating the quality aspect nowadays, practically. I'm also trying to productize my expertise and I see quite a lot of confusion among startups these days between: moving fast(whatever that means), quality, hitting PMF and/or growth.

Comments

ativzzz · 2026-06-29 15:48:22 UTC

Everyone is QA at a startup. I hope y'all are using your own product regularly right? You should have a nice simple way to raise these issues, maybe a slack channel or something with a convenient way to turn a screenshot into an item in your todo/work system if you have one. Encourage product ownership.

Alternatively, if you don't really care about the product, everyone is also customer support at a startup - you should be quickly be able to solve regressions that customers raise. I hope that at least you are talking to your customers and are very responsive to them at a startup.

ejhooooon · 2026-06-30 07:27:35 UTC

I second this.

gary4gar · 2026-06-29 16:40:39 UTC

Everyone does QA at a startup. There is no dedicated QA. If you're a developer, you're doing QA. Product, whatever your job title is, you're doing QA.

mmarian · 2026-06-29 17:11:18 UTC

Even the customer does QA.

ChrisRun · 2026-06-30 01:12:43 UTC

And very soon no longer a customer

catfish-1234 · 2026-06-29 20:57:52 UTC

The investors doing QA too

spacesh1psoda · 2026-06-29 17:51:13 UTC

I guess usually using things like sentry or having a close conversation with customers.

pranshuchittora · 2026-06-29 19:14:54 UTC

Use https://github.com/vostride/agent-qa you don't need a QA team just ask coding harness to write tests and you can review the test runs.

plagiarismplus · 2026-06-29 20:18:19 UTC

Is there any AI Agent do it ?

pranshuchittora · 2026-06-29 20:59:46 UTC

Yes - https://github.com/vostride/agent-qa

journal · 2026-06-30 08:48:57 UTC

QA should not be done by the same entity writing code.