Drowned in Slack, Calls and Bugs: A QA Survival Guide

Slack is buzzing, meetings take over your calendar, bugs appear in production out of nowhere. And yet, you are expected to keep things under control. Hi, I’m Olga, a QA engineer with 4+ years of experience. Today I want to share how I keep chaos in a startup environment manageable and what actually helped me stay sane. ⸻ So, what are these startup-ish issues? How did I get here? Being a QA is like being a bottleneck sometimes. You are needed in almost every discussion. A bug that was not present on the dev stand somehow slipped into production, everything is on fire, and on top of that you are expected to find time for self-improvement and learning new technologies. Otherwise, you risk becoming irrelevant. Hopefully, I am joking about the last one. As a result, QA feels overwhelmed and makes mistakes that lead back to production bugs. The circle closes. ⸻ My steps are not exclusive. You probably already know them. But knowing and applying are two different things. When you are overwhel