A Practical Afternoon Plan for Automated QA on a Small Web App

Small web apps tend to fail in the same few places, including signup, login, the main form, checkout, and the most-visited page. The article recommends listing the five to ten flows whose failure would cost money or users, and naming for each a start page, steps, and a clear on-screen success signal. It advises running tests against a stable, safe environment such as a staging deployment, with a dedicated test account and test payment cards, and planning how one-time login codes will be handled. A free, no-account audit tool can show what an automated service could cover from the outside, which helps identify flows that must be tested manually. The author outlines three approaches: writing tests by hand with Playwright or Cypress, using recorder tools that tend to be brittle, or using AI agents to write and review a suite for a fee starting at $29 per month.