Guerrilla QA: Testing in the Real World (Not Silicon Valley)

Most QA content falls into two camps: hyper-technical deep dives that assume you have unlimited resources, or executive-level perspectives from people who haven’t touched a test case in years. But what about the rest of us?

The lone wolf QA person juggling manual testing while trying to set up basic automation with free tools. The tester at a 50-person startup where “staging environment” means whatever you can cobble together. The QA professional convincing developers to write testable code while everyone else is moving fast and breaking things.

Welcome to guerrilla QA, making quality happen despite the constraints.

The Reality Gap

I’ve been reading QA blogs lately, and there’s a massive gap in the middle. You’ll find articles about advanced CI/CD pipelines that assume you have dedicated DevOps support. Or leadership advice from VP-level QA folks at FAANG companies with teams of 50+ testers.

But what about the QA person who’s the only tester on the team? The one dealing with scrappy agile processes where the product manager wants everything shipped yesterday? Most real-world QA work isn’t happening at Facebook or Netflix with unlimited budgets and perfect processes.

It’s happening in the trenches, with resource constraints and imperfect setups.

Branch-Level Testing: The Unspoken Reality

Here’s something most companies never share publicly: their actual testing workflows. Everyone talks about best practices, but few discuss the messy reality of how testing actually gets done.

Take branch-level testing. It’s been a thing for years, but companies keep their specific approaches close to the vest. I’ve been on lots of projects that use branch-level testing, but there are still plenty of teams stuck with just staging and prod environments.

In our current setup, we test at the branch level, then do regression in staging, even UAT in staging, before releasing to prod. It’s not the textbook approach, but it works for our constraints and team size.

That’s guerrilla QA, working with what you have, not what the ideal world says you should have.

The Scrappy Advantage

When you’re resource-constrained, you get creative. You learn to:

• Prioritize ruthlessly: When you can’t test everything, you get really good at identifying what actually matters
• Automate strategically: You focus on automating the painful, repetitive stuff first, not building comprehensive test suites
• Communicate efficiently: When you’re the only QA voice in the room, you learn to make your points count
• Adapt quickly: Processes that don’t work get dropped fast when you don’t have the luxury of committee meetings

These constraints actually make you better at QA. You develop instincts that folks with unlimited resources sometimes miss.

Tools for the Resourceful

Forget the enterprise-grade everything. Guerrilla QA is about finding tools that work within your budget and constraints:

• Free and open-source first: Why pay for expensive tools when free alternatives exist?
• Manual testing that scales: Sometimes the most efficient approach is strategic manual testing, not everything is automated
• Simple automation: A few well-chosen automated checks beat complex frameworks you can’t maintain

The key is matching tools to your actual needs, not what looks impressive on a resume.

Leading Without Authority

Whether you’re the sole QA person or managing a small team, guerrilla QA often means leading without formal authority. You’re not the “QA Manager” with direct reports, you’re the person who has to influence developers, product managers, and stakeholders to care about quality.

This teaches you skills that formal hierarchy can’t:

• How to make a compelling case for quality
• When to push back and when to compromise
• How to build respect through competence, not title

I mentioned that QA needs to be part of the team not an afterthought, and QAs also need to be part of the planning process like what I written here : A scalable QA Framework AQLM.

The AI Testing Gap

Speaking of gaps, I’ve been seeing an influx of searches about AI prompts for QA testing. We have AI tooling for developers, writers, business owners, creatives but QA seems underserved.

That’s another guerrilla opportunity. While everyone else waits for the perfect QA-specific AI tools, the resourceful tester is already figuring out how to use ChatGPT for test case generation, edge case brainstorming, and documentation cleanup. I talked about the power of having an AI assistant for testing, use it as a thinking assistant, help you test faster, smarter, and more focused

Making Quality Happen Anyway

Guerrilla QA isn’t about cutting corners or lowering standards. It’s about being resourceful and pragmatic while maintaining quality. It’s about finding solutions that work in the real world, not just in theory.

The beautiful thing about this approach is that it’s transferable. Learn to do quality work with constraints, and you’ll excel when you finally do have better resources. But learn quality only with perfect conditions, and you’ll struggle the moment things get messy.

This is tactical QA for the real world. No Silicon Valley unicorn setups required.

Jaren Cudilla
QA Overlord

Survived the 5-devs-to-1-QA ratio wars and lived to tell the tale. Champion of branch-level testing when CI/CD was just a dream, master of guerrilla shift-left tactics when resources were thin, and expert at making quality happen with whatever tools were lying around. Has tested in production more times than he’d like to admit, usually because staging was broken again. Writes tactical QA content at QAJourney.net for teams who work in the real world, not Silicon Valley fantasy land.

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