Ibotta has nearly 30 million downloads, 4 million monthly active users, and app store ratings of 4.5 stars. Yet, we’ve never had a full time QA team at our company. How have we managed to still scale fast, ship quality code, and keep our users so happy?

Startups have to move fast to get to market. But, the combination of moving fast and not having the funding for proper QA can lead to potentially devastating consequences. An app that works poorly degrades user (and investor) confidence, and isn't going to get your company very far. In a startup, developers are responsible for both writing and testing their own code. How can you ship high quality features to production, while maintaining existing app functionality? How do you find bugs fast? What is the best way to release a new feature that’s a bit risky?

In this talk I’ll be sharing strategies we’ve used at Ibotta for testing code quickly and effectively, without a full time QA team. We’ll also go through ways to reduce your risks and set up safeguards when releasing a new feature. Finally, we’ll talk about how to employ your coworkers as your testers, and strategies for spinning up a bare-bones QA team.

Kelly Shuster
Kelly Shuster currently leads the Android Engineering team at Ibotta, and spent the previous decade as an engineer, working in both hardware and software. She enjoys sharing her technical knowledge by speaking at conferences all around the world, most recently keynoting at mDevCamp in Prague. Kelly was one of Denver Business Journal’s “40 Under 40” in 2016, and is part of the Google Developer Experts program for Android development.