MVP’s Product Owners & Testing Testing MVP’s Product Owners Testing As A Product Owner

Was in an entrepreneurship program called The Foundation in late 2012 early 2013. The goal was to start a SaaS company in 6 months. I failed.

This post isn’t about that failure though.

I was asked a question about software testing from someone during that time who did go on to start a business.

Today I will share my thoughts from two years ago.

The Question: What are best methods to set up testing/QA plan? I’m putting together a list of activities but would appreciate any guidance on software testing?

The Answer: Congrats on almost having the MVP ready to go. Because your about to release an MVP, the most bang for your buck at this time would be to come up with a list of smoke test. Smoke test are used to check that the most critical part of the software.

You’ll want to run these smoke test every time the developer give you a new build. It’s one of the first steps of the QA plan. As time goes on you can make this whole process more structured but I think this would be a good start.

So the simplest way to do this would be to brainstorm & list out the most important functionality of your app. This should be things that if they don’t work someone wouldn’t be able to use the app at all.

An example for Twitter would be, does clicking the Tweet button post my Tweet?

When the developer hands over a ‘stable’ build go through the list and make sure that everything works as expected.

When the smoke clears (good pun right?) you’ll have a reasonable idea of the quality of the system and can do more detailed testing if you would like.

The great thing about this type of testing is that when everything passes you’ll have a good chance that things wont just blow up, & all the key areas are covered.

Thanks,

Saeed

P.S. Kind of just brain dumped, let me know if this makes any sense at all. Also Wikipedia has a pretty good explantation of smoke testing here.

Very similar to my post The Test to Automate First.