Why Startups Fail at Testing and How to Fix it

Pragya Yadav

Startups are synonymous with innovation, agility, and rapid growth. When you are a startup, your top priority is to move as fast as possible. At the same time, you can’t have a product that frequently breaks. Otherwise, you won’t be able to retain customers, and you won’t even be able to understand if you have a product-market fit. However, a common stumbling block for many startups is testing. You absolutely have to test; however, testing takes ultra-precious time and inhibits your ability to move fast.

Additionally, poor testing practices can lead to product failures, loss of customer trust, and, ultimately, the startup’s downfall. In this blog, we will explore why startups often fail at testing and how they can overcome these challenges using intelligent test automation.

The Problem

“Your business plan is a hypothesis that must be tested and adapted according to what you learn” – Eric Ries.

You tested something, and did you get a bug? Too bad! Now, you have to test it again after the bug gets fixed. Manually testing everything drains a lot of resources from your dev team or forces you to hire testing resources when you may prefer to invest in adding more software engineers. If you test manually (yourself/developers/hire people), you’ll struggle to scale your test coverage, AND your business will suffer. The speed of manually re-testing every change is just too time-prohibitive.

But what about test automation? Are you using automated tests for your startup?

Why do Startups Stumble in Testing?

Here are some answers to the questions that were brought up:

• Limited Resources: As a startup, you have lean teams and tight budgets. We totally understand that this can lead to testing being deprioritized in favor of feature development.
• Frequent Releases: Startups usually work on quick iterations and frequent releases. This constant flux can make it difficult to create, run, and maintain comprehensive test suites.
• Technical Debt: As startups evolve, codebases can become complex and entangled. This technical debt makes testing more challenging and time-consuming than it was before.
• Lack of Expertise: You might not have experienced QA engineers or expensive test automation engineers on staff, leading to ad-hoc testing practices and missed edge cases.
• Manual Testing Bottlenecks: Relying heavily on manual testing can be slow, error-prone, and unscalable for you.

Is Your Test Automation Broken?

The basic problem here is that there are multiple types of tests in a test automation pyramid. Sure, you’d want to write unit tests since they are a great way to speed up your development. Your developers can unit test certain functions without having to run the modules together. On the other hand, integration tests are much worse than unit tests but still tolerable in terms of effort. When you want to make sure that the whole application flow works from a user’s perspective, you will need end-to-end tests. Where someone needs to check that your checkout flow works just right and seamlessly. Read in detail about End To End Testing.

The next problem is that, on average, it takes a couple of days to write a complex automated regression test through traditional test automation tools that require coding. Additionally, just setting up a Selenium testing environment will take you a couple of weeks!

Read these top 11 Reasons for NOT to Use Selenium for Automation Testing.

OK, well, you decided to push through by forcing your developers to write automated tests, and you made it. Congratulations, but now your developers hate you for making them write those nasty and boring end-to-end tests. Win? Nope.

Not only does it take about 30% of their time to write those tests, but now too much of their time is spent on supporting those tests. Yep, this is what they do now: fix bugs in their own tests and change tests when the code is updated. Full freaking time! Your devs are now stuck fixing blockers instead of executing on your P1 roadmap stories.

But wait, that’s not all. Your perfectly polished, beautiful, life-saving CI is now flaky and doesn’t work most of the time, and you can’t execute your favorite end-to-end tests in CI. Moreover, you can’t even make your automated tests part of your CD. They are just not stable enough to be a semaphore! Your devs are now spending a bunch of time investigating issues that aren’t real issues.

So, now you’re back to manual testing and investigating everything again instead of building.

Does it sound familiar? We understand totally.

With traditional test automation, you have to figure out why your tests broke. Was it a real bug? Or, yet again, do you need to update those stubborn & fragile automated tests manually? These exceptions, errors, and testing issues might lead you to insufficient application testing.

The High Price of Insufficient Testing

Neglecting proper testing might seem like a shortcut in the short term. Still, it can have devastating consequences:

• Critical Bugs in Production: Bugs that slip into production can disrupt user experiences, lead to data loss, and even compromise security.
• Increased Costs: Fixing bugs in production is significantly more expensive than catching them during development. Read in detail about the Impact of Late Bug Detection.
• Damaged Reputation: A buggy product can quickly tarnish your startup’s reputation, making it harder to attract and retain users.
• Missed Opportunities: While firefighting bugs, you might miss out on building new features and innovating.

The Solution

We believe any automation testing tool in 2024 must adhere to the following four bold principles:

1. No setup

Your test automation tool must just work out of the box. No painful onboarding and countless hours wasted helping new people learn how to set up a testing environment. Also, in the super-charged AI world, there should not be any need to use programming languages to create test scripts. You should be able to use generative AI or prompt engineering to create test cases quickly and easily.

2. It must generate robust tests for you

Your test automation tool should be intelligent enough to generate tests for you automatically. Yes, I get it; not every situation can be covered automatically for you. But when it can – it should. Also, when it can’t generate them using generative AI, then it should be outrageously simple to create good tests, even for people who can’t write code. Simplicity is the key here.

3. It must never fail without a good reason

Seriously, flakiness must not be tolerated as it is needlessly inefficient. Most of the reasons for flaky tests are easily addressable using smart test automation, including timeouts, random page load times, and, most importantly, reliance on XPath.

4. The system should maintain your tests

You should spend as little time as possible reacting to breaking changes in your application. Got a big change on the first steps affecting hundreds of tests? No problem – the system should figure out that it is a single issue, not hundreds, and let you address it in place. With just a couple of button clicks and maybe an edit or two. Also, today, we have self-healing test scripts, where your test automation tools recognize a change and incorporate that code change into your test scripts.

We believe that a great software testing system should help you to move faster, not slower. And this is why and how we built testRigor.

testRigor: Your Best Companion for Startup Testing

testRigor is an AI-powered end-to-end testing platform built to tackle the unique challenges startups face. It empowers teams to deliver high-quality software quickly and reliably.

Key Features of testRigor

• Plain English Test Cases: testRigor allows you to write test cases in plain English, eliminating the need for complex scripting. This democratizes testing and makes it accessible to everyone on the team.
• AI-Powered Test Maintenance: testRigor’s AI automatically updates test cases as your application evolves, dramatically reducing maintenance efforts.
• Self-Healing Tests: When changes occur, testRigor’s self-healing capabilities attempt to fix broken tests automatically, ensuring your test suite remains robust.
• End-to-End Testing: testRigor covers all layers of your application, from the UI to APIs and databases, ensuring comprehensive coverage. Read this step-by-step guide to learn How to do End-to-end Testing with testRigor.
• Cross-Platform Support: Test across web, mobile, and desktop platforms with ease.
• Parallel Test Execution: Speed up your testing process by running tests in parallel across multiple environments. Read in detail about Parallel Testing.
• Detailed Reporting: Get insightful reports and analytics to track your testing progress and identify areas for improvement.

How testRigor Empowers Startups?

1. Accelerated Testing: testRigor’s plain English test cases and AI-powered features drastically reduce the time and effort required to create and maintain tests. You will spend 99.5% less time maintaining tests in testRigor compared to Selenium. Read about a Selenium alternative.
2. Improved Test Coverage: By automating end-to-end tests, testRigor helps you achieve broader test coverage, catching bugs that manual testing might miss. Know how testRigor is a Test Automation Tool For Manual Testers.
3. Scalability: As your startup grows, testRigor scales effortlessly to accommodate your expanding needs. Read more about Test Scalability.
4. Cost Savings: testRigor’s efficient test creation and maintenance processes, along with its ability to prevent costly production bugs, lead to significant cost savings. Read How to Save Budget on QA.
5. Enhanced Team Collaboration: testRigor’s user-friendly interface and plain English test cases encourage collaboration between developers, testers, and product owners. You all can work together on the test creation, execution, review, etc.

How to Implement testRigor in Your Startup?

With testRigor, you can automate web, mobile (hybrid, native), desktop, API, database, file handling, QR code, Captcha resolution, email, phone, SMS, 2FA, and many more complex scenarios in just plain English (or any other natural language). You can even perform AI features testing using testRigor.

Read testRigor’s complete feature list to know more.

Let us now see how to use testRigor to solve your startup’s testing needs quickly and efficiently.

1. Assess Your Testing Needs

The first step in implementing testRigor is to assess your startup’s testing needs. Identify the key areas that require testing, such as functional, performance, security, UI, user experience (UX), etc. Determine the platforms and devices your application supports and outline the test scenarios you need to cover.

2. Onboard Your Team

testRigor’s no-code approach makes it easy for team members with varying levels of technical expertise to get involved in the testing process. Encourage collaboration between developers, testers, and other stakeholders to create a cohesive testing strategy. testRigor supports BDD 2.0 or SDD (Specification Driven Development), where you can directly use your application specifications as automated test cases.

3. Create Test Cases

With testRigor, creating test cases is straightforward. Use natural language to define the steps and expected outcomes for each test scenario. Use testRigor’s AI-powered test generation to automatically create additional test cases based on user behavior and application interactions. Ensure that your test cases cover all critical areas of your application.

4. Integrate with CI/CD Pipelines

Integrate testRigor with your existing CI/CD pipelines to automate the execution of tests. Configure testRigor to run tests with every code change, ensuring that any issues are detected and addressed promptly. This integration enables continuous testing and supports rapid development cycles.

You can also import/ copy manual test cases from test management tools, including TestRail, Zephyr, PractiTest, Qase, and all other popular test management tools. These test cases can be directly run as automated tests with small tweaks.

5. Monitor and Analyze Test Results

Regularly monitor and analyze the test results provided by testRigor. Review the detailed reports and analytics to identify trends, track performance metrics, and prioritize issues. Use this data to make informed decisions and continuously improve your testing processes. Read: Which Tests Should I Automate First?

Conclusion

Startups face unique challenges when it comes to testing, but these challenges can be overcome with the right tools and strategies. testRigor offers an advanced solution that empowers startups to implement efficient, effective, and scalable testing processes.

With its no-code test automation, AI-powered test generation, cross-platform testing, CI/CD integration, visual regression testing, detailed reporting, and scalability, testRigor addresses the key pain points that startups encounter in their testing journey.

By utilizing testRigor, startups can ensure that their applications are thoroughly tested, free of defects, and ready to deliver exceptional user experiences. Investing in robust testing practices not only enhances product quality but also builds customer trust and positions startups for long-term success.

“We spent so much time on maintenance when using Selenium, and we spend nearly zero time with maintenance using testRigor.”

Keith Powe VP Of Engineering - IDT