Why skipping QA slows you down

Fast-moving SaaS companies often skip QA in the name of speed. But here’s the hard truth: Skipping it doesn’t make you faster, it just defers the cost until it’s bigger, riskier, and harder to fix. Teams think they’re saving time. In reality, they’re injecting fragility into the release pipeline, and eventually, it catches up.

The shortcut that always becomes a detour.

Fast-moving SaaS companies often skip QA in the name of speed. But here’s the hard truth: Skipping it doesn’t make you faster, it just defers the cost until it’s bigger, riskier, and harder to fix.

Teams think they’re saving time. In reality, they’re injecting fragility into the release pipeline, and eventually, it catches up.

Here’s what actually happens when you “go faster” by skipping QA:

1. Firefighting becomes a full-time job

No QA? Then bugs land in production. Now you’re patching live issues, chasing logs, calming down angry customers, and pulling devs off roadmap work to fix what should’ve never shipped.

Each skipped test becomes a future rollback, hotfix, or support ticket.
That’s not speed. That’s thrash.

GitLab (2017): A single engineer deleted the production database due to missing checks and no QA safety nets. The recovery took days and devs lost months of roadmap momentum.

2. UAT turns into bug triage

Skipping structured QA doesn’t eliminate testing, it just shifts the burden downstream. Now UAT is a war zone. Bugs, edge cases, performance issues, all found after the build was “done.” You burn cycles in late-stage rework, kill morale, and miss your windows.

Facebook (2018): A bug in the “View As” feature went undetected because the edge case wasn’t covered in testing. It led to 50 million compromised accounts and a major trust issue.

3. Shipping slows down because no one trusts the code

When QA is ad hoc or absent, every release feels risky. Stakeholders lose confidence. Releases get held up. Engineers hesitate. Rollbacks multiply. Soon, shipping becomes scary, and you’re stuck in a culture of caution.

Knight Capital (2012): Lack of consistent QA led to a botched release that lost $440M in 45 minutes. After that, every deploy became a liability, and the company never recovered.

4. The slowdown is invisible until it’s expensive

Skipping QA doesn’t feel like a problem until:

  • Devs are doing double work (code -> release -> fix -> repeat)
  • PMs are re-cutting scope to deal with regressions
  • Leadership starts asking why nothing is shipping clean

Samsung (2016): Rushed QA on the Galaxy Note 7 led to exploding batteries. A product meant to move fast cost the company $17B and forced a global recall.

5. The best engineers leave

Engineers want to build, not babysit bugs. A broken QA process leads to late nights, broken trust, and low morale. Over time, your strongest ICs burn out or leave, and your actual velocity nosedives.

Equifax (2017): A missed patch created the biggest data breach in history. The real root cause? No system in place to ensure traceable fixes. The damage: $575M+ and loss of public trust.

The paradox: real QA makes you faster

Here’s what great QA does for high-performing teams:

  • Catches bugs before they become firefights
  • Keeps UAT lean and release cycles clean
  • Builds trust so teams ship faster, with less ceremony
  • Removes fear, replaces chaos with confidence

It’s not about more process. It’s about less rework, fewer blockers, and releases that feel routine, not risky.

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