Tip #5 - Build Robust QA Testing as You Scale

The second you have more than a few thousand users, hiring a tester is a good idea

I’ve shipped sooo many bugs to the App Store by accident over my career, it’s actually embarrassing. One of the worst bugs was when I accidentally made the app free for all users because I put “return true” for the subscription status function during testing and forgot to remove it. In the early days of making an app, most developers do their own testing and a few ambitious devs might even use automated testing.

The second your app has more than a few thousand users and is generating 100’s of dollars a day, any critical bug could lead to a big headache and lost revenue. At this point, you should hire a QA tester on Upwork or somewhere else who can go through your app and do regression testing before each release.

First, a good QA tester will insist on building test cases for your app which are basically a list of all the things to test. Hashtag Expert has over 350 of these and here are some examples:

Each test case also has preconditions, steps, and expected results.

You don’t need to be this in-depth, but it’s a good idea, even if you do it yourself, to make a list of all the scenarios and test cases you want to have of your app. These should center around in-app purchases, account creation, and core user flows.

The end result is that when you quickly build a new feature and want to ship it to the App Store, you have peace of mind that none of your core functionality is broken and no major bugs are present in the App. By following this framework, we were able to ship Hashtag Expert updates for years without any mission-critical bugs.

Previously, I used to have anxiety any time a new release was going out in case there were hidden bugs that needed fixing. Now, my stress levels are much lower because of our amazing QA tester and our hundreds of test cases.