Fridays are for quality

and it's worth it

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2 min read

Quality can quickly become a major problem when features are being delivered at a faster pace. It's hard to justify spending time on quality when there is a goal to deliver by a deadline. From my experience, it's just hard to stop working on developing new features and spend time on writing unit tests, integration tests, synthetic tests, work on monitoring etc. These are not exciting for developers and not make visible difference for customers trying the product.

Especially when working on an MVP in a small startup with limited runway, does it make sense to spend time on quality? Even from my current experience working on a startup, it's just hard to find time to improve code coverage as the velocity increases. People may have differing opinions, what's good quality if you ultimately not deliver an MVP 🤷 . I have given good thought on what really makes sense for my startup and decided that it's worth spending the time on quality.

Time spent on quality is worth the investment keeping long term goals in mind. People are the major cost for any technology company. For a small company with limited resources, we just can't add dedicated people working on quality. If more features are delivered with limited automation, we will lack the confidence to push any new changes and can easily introduce regressions. And going back to old features to improve quality is just not an option.

As of now, even in the early stages of a startup, I have decided to dedicate Fridays for quality. It's just writing boring tests and refactoring for a better tomorrow. I am confident that the time spent will be well worth it.