QA is Insurance for Winners

When you pay for Quality Assurance, what are you actually buying? You're not buying bug reports in Jira; you're buying insurance. But what kind of insurance is it?

Typical insurance protects against catastrophic losses. QA makes sure you don't lose catastrophically.

Imagine that you own a restaurant, and you insure it against fire. If the restaurant burns to the ground, hopefully, the insurance company will cut you a check. But who really wants that outcome? Nobody. You would probably prefer to prevent your business from burning down in the first place.

Quality assurance preserves hard-fought gains by making sure you don't lose them. Like a smoke detector, quality assurance helps software teams detect problems while they are still small, and ideally fix them before customers even notice.

Moving fast and breaking things is for losers

How can you say that? Mark Zuckerberg is smart, and he's way richer than you! Maybe because even Mark Zuckerberg had to eat his own words and go back on what he said:

The new motto: "Move fast with stable infrastructure." It "may not be quite as catchy as 'move fast and break things,'" Zuckerberg said with a smirk. "But it's how we operate now."

Smart investors understand that you'd rather protect a win than try to recoup a loss. The reason is simple: if you take a 50% loss, you need a 100% gain to make your money back. The key to winning is to keep your losses small.

Mark Spitznagel of Universa Investments was making gains of 3,600% in March 2020 while most investors were reeling from COVID. As he puts it:

My approach is diametrically opposed to virtually all investors: It’s to lose a very small amount a vast majority of the time. And then on very rare occasions, make a whole lot. And in doing so, we lower risk in a client’s portfolio.

By helping companies to reliably deliver consistent value to their customers, QA encourages customer loyalty and protects a company's brand and reputation, all of which add up to long-term success. By preventing catastrophic losses from occurring in the first place, quality assurance keeps you in the game so that you can release new software features and continue to win.