In always fast-developing technological world, the question whether an IT company can survive without having a Quality Assurance (QA) team or not seems to be actual as never before.
Being small private IT company or big, pace is always the same, speed in delivery is important. Competition is big, customers are nowadays having less patience. Every detail matters, from UX to quality of the product. If you want to succeed, having smooth user experience is the key. When you signup to the service, if experience at first minute is not good, your potential customer is gone to the competitor. Same goes for every feature you have inside. Everything matters. Some more than other, but ultimately quality is the key.
If you are super small company, a startup, you might want to cut expenses and live on the edge for a while. That is understandable. In such case when you get on your feet, and you decide that flying in a non-tested brand new airplane is still good idea, it is your legitimate right. That airplane can have malfunction and crash any second now, however with lots of good luck it may be success. Question is, do you want to invest your time/money into a company that is basing its success on luck?
In software delivery cycle, quality assurance is very important process to quality development, it is ensuring that product attains certain levels of quality before it lands in the hands of the user. One thing we all need to accept, is that we are humans and we all make mistakes. That is normal. Some make more, some make less. Without QA, companies release their products with bugs, security gaps, and risk having their reputation and financial base collapsed.
QA is not only about finding bugs but more about proving the product is reliable, user-friendly, and meeting the expectations of its users. Those are the goals. If the company wants to attain high level of quality, entire company needs to be more educated in quality assurance. Mindset is the key. Being safe is always better then being fastest.
Would you rather buy nicest looking fast car with highest speed and newest tech but you know it is not tested for safety, or would you drive competitors car who released slightly later but it passed all the safety and quality tests?
I presume decision would be on the latter
If you run a IT company, and you don't have a QA, you should consider adding testing into your delivery process.
There are different types of testing, and depending on what QA resources you have, QA team covers an all-round check of the product as far as its functionality, happy-path covering, negative-path covering, edge-case covering, usability, frontend manual and automated testing, api manual and
automated testing, etc.
All of this will depend on the developers to find and fix all the problems without any QA. That will only slow down the development pace and remove resources from innovative work.
Also mindset of a developer and QA is very different oriented.
In my experience, QA can find 10 bug where dev can not see 1 bug looking at his code.
In conclusion, theoretically, an IT company might manage without the QA team, but practically, without it, the quality of products would be more likely compromised, and satisfaction of the customers on the long run, its in great danger. There is no overstating the importance of quality assurance in the software development life cycle because it is an indispensable part of the cycle.
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