MuukTest vs. Hiring QAs: Which Choice Is Right for You?

We’ve talked to hundreds of startups and can confidently report that nobody is excited to build up an army of QAs to test their software.

But this is the inevitable fate: Startups build a big QA team as the QA automation workload grows. The more tests are automated, the more time is spent maintaining tests and triaging bugs. The workload forces you to keep hiring more QAs to keep up.

Over time, software companies wind up with a 3:1 or 4:1 developer-to-QA ratio; 20% or more of the development budget goes to QA.

Startups hiring QAs often come to us and wonder if MuukTest is an alternative to building an army of QAs, and the answer is: Yes!

If you don’t have an existing QA team, or if you have a small team that you’d like to keep small, MuukTest is a new alternative to hiring that’s worth considering.

MuukTest vs. Hiring (No QA Team)

If you don’t have a QA team, you’re not alone. We’ve seen software companies with 20+ developers who are just getting around to hiring their first QA!

In many cases, startups wait as long as possible to hire their first QA. This means the QA gets pulled into 

If your goal is for your new QA to spend all of her time manually running regressions every sprint, then it makes sense to hire a QA. (You  will soon find that this QA gets overloaded, and you’ll need to hire another one - or bring Muuk on as well!)

Startups without QAs typically want to start building out an automated test suite that helps them:

• Test faster than a manual tester would
• Test more than just their critical flows

If your goal is to speed up development, accelerate testing cycles, test more, and ship higher-quality software, it’s worth considering MuukTest. Our AI-powered solution and platform are designed to help startups get to an automated test suite they can trust.

In-house, you’ll need 3+ QAs to even get started on a QA automation project - your first QA hires tend to get overloaded with manual testing and requests from engineering.

MuukTest vs. Hiring (Small QA Team)

Some startups have a few QAs, and their QA automation project is well underway. Why not just keep hiring?

After all, you don’t want to:

• Lose the progress you’ve already made on QA automation
• Train the team on some new tool or technique - with the risk of it just being a waste of time
• Bring something in that doesn’t work well with your team, and risk turnover or frustration

Here’s why software companies still consider MuukTest even with an existing team :

1. The team doesn’t have to learn a new tool - they can continue automating in Selenium or Playwright (or another coded framework) if they choose
2. You won’t lose any progress - all tests can be uploaded into the MuukTest automation suite and integrated into your CI/CD
3. MuukTest can do the automation + maintenance work of multiple QA engineers, and you can choose to focus MuukTest on the things your team doesn’t want to do or have bandwidth for (e.g., all your team’s test maintenance, mobile testing, etc.)
4. MuukTest can scale up to do more work without hiring further - so your last QA hire can be your last QA hire!

Sometimes you want to hire a QA to do more specialized things than test automation and maintenance. In that case, it might be better to bring on a specialist in-house. Otherwise, it’s worth considering MuukTest!

What if I’ve Just Hired a QA?

In a lot of cases, MuukTest is ”hired” alongside a new QA (or one who was hired in the past few months). Here’s why:

QA is generally understaffed, and new hires can quickly get overwhelmed and start to burn out. This has negative impacts beyond your QA team. Your developers wait longer for QA’s review, and bugs slip through more frequently. This hurts your entire development team’s ability to accomplish your roadmap.

MuukTest is a way to prevent your new QA from getting overwhelmed with work and burning out - why risk them falling behind?

What if I Just Got Budget Approval for Hiring A QA?

As we mentioned, some companies “hire” MuukTest instead of hiring a QA.

But if your main concern is that you had to fight for budget approval for a QA, and now you’re going to have to go back to your boss and say, “Actually I want to go in a different direction.”

What we’ve seen work: Consider MuukTest like interviewing an AI-powered QA hire who can do the work of a full QA team!

So you get to say: “I found a better approach. Plus we can try it for 1 month and if we’re not satisfied, we get our money back. Why not try this out while we interview?”