5 ways to accelerate quality – Lean QA methods for Lean Startups

A Minimum Viable Product by definition is a Product and by virtue of this must solve a real problem in a real world production scenario with sufficient quality, which usually means something that customers are willing to pay for. Unfortunately engineering and business culture often focuses too much on minimum features but forget about their viability. This results in products being unstable, unusable and unacceptable. So for a Product to survive it very important that Quality is accelerated early into the Product life cycle. Its important that Startups don’t see QA as someone who would delay their goto market, rather QA should be seen as an instrument which would allow them to take their MVP to market with better quality and higher confidence.

Its recommended that the Startups following Lean methodology to follow Build-Stabilize-Measure-Learn cycle. The QA should run parallel to Dev in the Build phase so as to ensure that Startups need to spend optimal time in the Stabilize phase.

Following are the ways in which you can accelerate Quality in your Product Life cycle while keeping QA cycle Lean :

• Mentor the Dev team on Quality so that focus on Quality is ingrained in the team from early stages.
• Involve QA to validate the Design of Wireframes for App intuitiveness, Page Layout, interface elements, navigational flow, A/B testing, Human Interface Guidelines etc. This will ensure early feedback and less re-work at a later stage.
• Once the UI Design is integrated with the Code, involve QA to ensure Functional stability of the app, no crashes and integration with backend.
• Good User experience is an critical component for MVP, it takes customers less than 2mins to access the app and uninstall it. So ensure that Testing is done right from installation of the app to all customer touch points to app intuitiveness to end-to-end customer journey.
• Before the app is released its important to ensure that your app doesn’t consume too much of battery, data and works well across varying network conditions
• A quick test of the app across a lean sample of the most popular devices of the target market will go a long way to ensure engineering components of your product are well oiled for MVP launch.

Above steps will ensure that you are mitigating the risks surrounding your MVP from the initial stages. You would be giving your MVP much better chance of surviving in market and also would safeguard your time & money by avoiding slippages, re-work and customer backlash.