Skipping Automated Tests Won’t Make Your Startup Faster

A founder told me he’d asked his developer to skip the automated tests for a release because he couldn’t afford to move slowly. I understood. Runway makes people do practical things.

So I told him about the strictest project of my career. I architected a Class III medical device, the FDA’s highest-risk category, where a software defect could reach a patient. Every requirement was traced to the code that implemented it, every change was reviewed, and nothing shipped without evidence that it worked.

That project had less drama than most startups I’ve worked with since. Nobody was pulling 2 AM heroics or panicking on release day. The discipline everyone assumes is slow was the reason releases were calm, and the teams I see burning weeks today are usually stuck on a problem a test would have caught in minutes.

You don’t need the FDA’s rulebook. You need a small version of the same posture: automated tests on anything that touches money or customer data, a written record of big decisions, and a rule that nothing ships until someone besides the author has looked at it. All of it together is maybe a week of setup.

I’ve watched what happens without it. The skipped test comes back as a billing bug in production, and the two weeks spent chasing it cost more than the testing ever would have.

Speed and discipline aren’t a tradeoff. Ask any team that has both.