Before You Hire QA Engineers

Hiring a QA engineer is a common milestone in the software development life cycle—but for many startups, it might not be the right move just yet. Whether you’re building your first MVP or scaling your software development team, it’s essential to understand when a dedicated quality assurance engineer is truly needed, and when modern testing processes and tools can fill the gap. Startups often operate with lean teams where software engineers, product managers, and even founders perform manual and automated testing themselves. It's important to note that while manual testers may not require extensive coding abilities, they should possess a foundational understanding of software development principles, distinguishing their role from that of automation testers.

🎯 TL;DR – Before You Hire QA Engineers

• Hiring QA too early can slow down agile teams with added costs, management overhead, and fragile test maintenance—use that time and money to build features instead.
• In early stages, share testing responsibilities across the team and use lightweight tools like BugBug to automate critical flows without code or hiring.
• Avoid single points of failure and bloated processes by empowering developers, PMs, and designers to collaborate on quality assurance.
• Build lean, scalable test practices first—integrate testing into CI/CD, automate core paths, track bugs systematically, and scale when your product and team mature.
• BugBug provides a smarter alternative to hiring QA early, offering codeless E2E testing, CI/CD support, and affordable pricing to keep your releases fast and reliable.

Before launching a job search or defining a position that requires specific knowledge of programming languages like Python or Java, consider whether your current team has the communication skills, critical thinking, and ability to develop and execute lightweight test plans internally. QA engineers typically possess a bachelor’s degree in computer science, engineering, or a related field. This educational background underscores the importance of having a solid foundation in software development and quality assurance.

With the right automated software testing tools, clear documentation, and strong written communication skills, your team may already be equipped to deliver reliable test results—without adding headcount or expanding your total compensation package.

This article explores the practical steps every startup should take to improve software QA and testing practices before hiring, and how to align testing strategy with your current projects, technologies, and goals.

There’s a smarter way to maintain software quality without the cost and complexity of building a QA team from day one.

When You Shouldn't Hire QA Engineers?

Early MVP Stage

At the MVP stage, speed and iteration are more important than comprehensive testing. A small, focused team can handle basic quality checks using quick sanity tests and direct user feedback. There’s no need for a full QA department or expensive enterprise testing tools at this point. Founders and developers can fix issues on the fly as they work toward product-market fit.

However, in certain scenarios, having experienced QA testers can be invaluable. These professionals can seamlessly integrate into client teams for flexible staff augmentation, ensuring high-quality performance and adherence to industry standards through rigorous recruitment and continuous training.

Small Dev Team & Tight Budget

When you’re working with a small development team and limited funds, testing becomes a shared responsibility. Hiring a QA engineer can be a significant cost—money that’s often better spent on building and shipping features. On top of that, recruiting, onboarding, and managing QA talent takes time and resources that early-stage teams may not have. Additionally, HR managers assess candidates not only on technical qualifications but also on their soft skills to ensure a good cultural fit. Instead, leveraging the benefits of alternative approaches, such as using lightweight automation tools or shared testing responsibilities, can be more efficient and cost-effective.

Rapidly Changing Product

Startups move fast. If your product or UI is constantly evolving, formal test cases can quickly become outdated and require constant maintenance. In these dynamic environments, maintaining automated test scripts can be particularly challenging, as they need to be continuously updated to ensure reliable performance. In these dynamic environments, it’s often more efficient for developers or product managers to test changes themselves rather than rely on a fragile, heavily scripted QA process. Collaboration between developers and QA engineers is crucial in such settings to ensure quality while adapting to rapid changes. As your product stabilizes, you can always introduce more structure later.

Lean Testing Tools in Place

Today’s startups can use modern tools to fill the gap. With lightweight automation platforms like BugBug, small teams can build automated end-to-end tests for critical flows—without needing to hire a full QA team. These tools help cover your most important use cases and ensure product quality, all while keeping costs and maintenance low. For many teams, this approach is enough to maintain confidence in releases until scaling up QA becomes necessary.

The Hidden Challenges of Hiring QA Too Early

Hiring a full-time QA engineer might seem like a logical step as your product grows—but doing so too early can introduce challenges that slow you down instead of helping you move faster.

Neglecting proper QA processes can significantly impact software product quality, leading to unreliable coverage and an increased risk of bugs in applications.

High CostsExperienced QA professionals can be expensive. For an early-stage startup operating on limited runway, those funds might be better spent on building product features or acquiring users. And it’s not just about the salary—recruiting, interviewing, and onboarding takes time and focus away from critical business priorities.

Management Overhead

Bringing on a QA function means introducing a new team discipline. Suddenly, someone has to manage test cycles, prioritize bugs, and coordinate feedback across departments. These responsibilities can be a big distraction for founders or tech leads who are already juggling product strategy and engineering management. A test manager can play a crucial role in managing QA processes and reducing management overhead by efficiently handling test writing and maintenance tasks, proactively addressing test failures, and maintaining communication with the development team. A separate QA team adds process—and sometimes friction—when your focus should be on staying agile.

Slower Release Cycles

One of the biggest risks of hiring QA too soon is slowing down your delivery pipeline. If every feature or fix has to wait for a formal QA sign-off—or if complex tools delay feedback—your team could be stuck in a bottleneck. Integrating QA engineering into the development process can further complicate release cycles, as additional QA staff is required to maintain quality assurance without any significant cost efficiencies. Ironically, this can lead to shortcuts: developers might skip tests or rush changes through, increasing the chances of bugs reaching production.

Test Maintenance Burden

If your QA team builds an automated test suite using traditional tools, it won’t maintain itself. As your product evolves, your test scripts must evolve too—and that takes time. Small teams often underestimate how much effort is required to keep automated tests running smoothly. QA engineers must also be familiar with various programming languages to effectively maintain and update these test scripts, which requires strong technical skills. If you’re spending hours each week just fixing broken tests, you’re losing valuable dev time and slowing your sprints.

Single-Point-of-Failure Risk

Relying on one QA engineer—or a very small QA team—can backfire. If that person is unavailable, testing stalls. If they miss a critical issue, no one else may catch it in time. Having multiple QA experts can mitigate this single-point-of-failure risk by ensuring continuous testing and diverse perspectives. Instead of siloing testing within one role, startups benefit more from a collaborative approach where the entire team shares responsibility for quality.

What You Really Need (Before You Hire)

Startups don’t need full-scale QA teams to ship high-quality software. What you really need is creating solutions for testing that streamline your processes and ensure efficiency. Identifying issues early in the development process is crucial to maintaining the quality and functionality of your software.

Adopting effective QA methodologies is essential before hiring QA, as it helps refine your testing plans and adopt best practices.

⚡ Fast feedback loops

✅ Confidence before every deployment

🤖 Automated testing that scales as you grow

BugBug helps you achieve all of that—without adding to your payroll.

✅ Before You Hire QA Team - Action Points

1. Define Your Testing Goals
   Clarify what you want to achieve: fewer bugs in production, faster releases, improved test coverage? Knowing your goals helps determine if you need a full-time QA or just better processes/tools.
2. Adopt a Codeless Test Automation Tool
   Use tools like BugBug to automate critical end-to-end tests without writing code. This empowers non-technical team members to contribute and avoids early hiring costs. Automation tools can significantly impact the software release process by reducing bottlenecks and ensuring higher software quality.
3. Start with Manual Smoke Tests
   Have your devs or PMs perform basic checks after each release. Focus on key flows like signup, checkout, or login to catch obvious issues fast.
4. Create a Lean Test Suite for Core User Flows
   Automate just the critical paths—things users do most often. You don’t need 100% coverage to start; 20–30% of key paths often catch 80% of issues. When designing tests, it’s crucial to consider how end users interact with the software to ensure the final product meets their expectations.
5. Integrate Testing Into CI/CD
   Plug your tests into your CI/CD pipeline (e.g., GitHub Actions). This ensures tests run automatically after every deployment without manual effort.
6. Use Free or Low-Cost Testing Tools
   Build your stack with startup-friendly tools:

• BugBug for E2E
• Postman for APIs
• BrowserStack for compatibility
• Lighthouse for performance and accessibility

1. Assign Testing Responsibility Across the Team
   Make quality a shared responsibility. Encourage devs, PMs, and designers to write and review tests. Avoid bottlenecks or single points of failure.

• QA Analyst Role: Include a QA analyst in your team to focus on manual testing. QA analysts collaborate with QA Leads to create test plans and identify bugs. Their observational skills are crucial in ensuring software quality.

1. Track Bugs and User Feedback Systematically
   Set up a clear process to log and prioritize bugs from users or internal QA runs using tools like Trello, Jira, or Notion.
2. Review Test Maintenance Burden
   If your test suite becomes too brittle or time-consuming to maintain, fix that first. Hiring QA won’t solve poor test design or flaky automation.
3. Wait Until Product & Team Have Stabilized
   Only consider hiring QA once your product matures, the team grows, and you need someone to scale testing, cover edge cases, or specialize in areas like accessibility or performance.

Meet BugBug: A Smarter Alternative to Hiring QA

BugBug is a codeless test automation tool designed for SaaS startups that want to stay lean and fast, offering a range of features to streamline the testing process. One of the key aspects of maintaining high software quality is regression testing, which ensures that new changes do not negatively impact existing functionalities. While a QA tester plays a crucial role in ensuring software quality and functionality through effective testing practices, BugBug helps you build and maintain end-to-end tests without writing a single line of code—so your developers, product managers, or even customer success team can pitch in.

Why Use BugBug Before Hiring QA?

• 👾 Codeless test creation – No need to write or maintain test scripts
• 🔁 Edit & Rewind – Instantly debug and modify tests from any step
• 🧪 Unlimited local test runs – Test as much as you want, without limits
• ☁️ Scheduled cloud testing – Catch bugs early with daily health checks
• ⚙️ CI/CD integration – Plug BugBug into your pipeline in minutes
• 💰 Affordable pricing – Freemium model + $119/mo Pro plan = startup-friendly
• 😊 Improved user satisfaction – Ensure high-quality products that meet user expectations

With BugBug, your team can build a reliable safety net around your product—and free up your devs to focus on features, not bug fixes.

Alternatives to Hiring QA (And When to Use Them)

If BugBug alone doesn’t cover all your needs, here’s how you can layer other cost-effective QA strategies before committing to a full team with the necessary qualifications for QA roles:

Functional testing is a critical aspect of software testing, ensuring that each function of the software operates according to the specifications.

Use Crowdsourced Manual Testing

Crowdsourced manual testing can be a great way to get diverse feedback on your product. It allows you to leverage a global pool of testers who can identify issues that might not be caught by automated tests. By choosing to hire QA testers for crowdsourced testing, you can ensure continuous code quality and deployment efficiency, while also benefiting from the cost-effectiveness and agility of outsourcing. Additionally, this approach can provide QA engineers with valuable experience and career growth opportunities, helping them progress from entry-level roles to more advanced positions within the tech industry.

1. Increase Unit Test Coverage

Low-hanging fruit for dev teams:

• Use tools like SonarQube to track coverage. QA testing is crucial in software development to ensure that as development teams grow, the demand for quality assurance is met effectively. Hiring a QA automation engineer can significantly increase test coverage and mitigate single-point-of-failure risks within the team.
• Leverage AI coding assistants like GitHub Copilot to generate unit tests faster. The role of a software tester is fundamental in the QA process, serving as a stepping stone to advanced positions within quality assurance.

2. Expand End-to-End Test Coverage

You don’t need QA engineers to create E2E tests:

• Use BugBug or tools like Autify Genesis, ContextQA, or Mobot
• Outsource test creation to agencies if needed. The company should support QA initiatives by providing the necessary resources and infrastructure.
• Focus on critical user journeys to catch real-world regressions. Effective testing strategies are essential for expanding test coverage, as they help uncover hidden issues and improve methodologies. Programs such as coding bootcamps and specialized training can equip QA engineers with the skills needed to enhance test coverage.

3. Use Crowdsourced Manual Testing

When you lack time or test coverage:

• Companies like Rainforest QA, Applause, and Testlio offer scalable, global manual testing services. The salary for QA engineers can vary significantly depending on the location, as well as the company’s size and industry.
• Useful for mobile, accessibility, localization, and exploratory testing. Usability testing is also crucial in crowdsourced testing to ensure a high-quality user experience. The position requires technical expertise, problem-solving abilities, and effective communication in a challenging work environment.
• No hiring, training, or availability headaches

4. Implement Synthetic Monitoring

Test your production environment 24/7:

• Tools like Checkly, Datadog, New Relic, and Catchpoint simulate user flows
• A bachelor’s degree in computer science is often a foundational requirement for QA roles, enhancing the ability to catch login failures, checkout issues, and API errors in real-time
• Attaining professional certifications can lead to higher-paying jobs in the QA sector, highlighting the significant roles QA Engineers play in tech
• Especially valuable for SaaS products that rely on uptime and reliability

Hiring QA testers can significantly enhance synthetic monitoring by leveraging their expertise to identify and resolve issues efficiently, ensuring high-quality performance and reliability.

So… When Should You Hire QA?

Eventually, you might need to scale your QA operations with in-house expertise. That point typically comes when:

• You’ve moved beyond MVP and your user base is growing fast
• Bugs are slipping through despite your automated safety nets
• Releases are being delayed or rolled back regularly
• You need deeper expertise in accessibility, security, or performance testing
• You need QA engineers to identify issues early in the development process

At this stage, automation testers become crucial. They bring the necessary programming knowledge to write scripts and code, enabling advanced testing methods that are essential for scaling QA operations.

QA engineers have critical responsibilities in ensuring software quality before its release. They are tasked with testing applications, analyzing data, and collaborating with teams to meet company standards and enhance product quality.

But if you’re not quite there yet, hiring QA could add more complexity than value.

Don’t Hire QA Too Early

Early-stage startups can’t afford to slow down. By skipping a dedicated QA hire (when it makes sense) and using a smart alternative like BugBug, you can launch faster, test more confidently, and save money all at once. BugBug empowers non-technical team members to contribute to quality assurance and gives developers the advanced tools they need – bridging the gap between “moving fast” and “not breaking things.” QA engineers work closely with software development teams to ensure effective testing and documentation, but BugBug allows you to achieve similar collaboration without the need for a dedicated QA team.

In the beginning, your small team can handle testing by sharing responsibility and relying on codeless automation. You’ll catch critical bugs without the overhead of managing a QA team, allowing you to focus on building features and growing your user base. Automation testing is particularly important for early-stage startups as it enhances efficiency in running tests and allows for faster iterations. As you scale and your app becomes more complex, you can always bring in dedicated QA professionals – but by then, BugBug will have helped you lay a strong foundation of test coverage and quality culture. Different organizations may have varying qualifications for QA roles, often requiring familiarity with programming languages.

Bottom line: You don’t necessarily need an expensive QA team to deliver a high-quality web app. With the right tools and approach, even a lean startup can achieve reliable end-to-end testing. BugBug is the kind of solution that lets you ship with confidence and keep your customers happy, without slowing you down or blowing your budget. It’s about working smarter, so you can continue to move fast – without ever compromising on quality.

Happy (automated) testing!