A ship checklist for a one-person team
Scripts, then one human path you can defend — not “we clicked around.” That is enough process for a solo ship without pretending you have a QA department.
A one-person team does not need a release train. You need a habit that answers is this build ready? without lying to yourself. The cheap lie is “I clicked around and it felt fine.” The expensive truth shows up as support tickets and refunds.
Use a short checklist. Two layers. Nothing theatrical.
Layer 1 — Scripts you already trust
Before humans: run the checks that prove the contracts you care about.
- CI green on the commit you will ship. Not “mostly green on main last week.” This build.
- Smoke the money path. Checkout, invite, or “create first project” — whichever breaks revenue or onboarding if it fails. Automate what you can; manually verify the rest once yourself.
- Staging matches the artifact. Same build hash or same zip. Do not test yesterday’s preview and ship today’s hotfix.
Scripts catch regressions you already named. They do not prove a stranger can finish the job cold.
Layer 2 — One human path you can defend
Pick the single failure you are afraid of this release. Write it as a mission a cold person can attempt in under twenty minutes:
- Start URL and credentials (or sandbox) that are not your personal account.
- Three to seven observable steps with a clear success state.
- A short form: finished / blocked, where it stalled, severity.
- A recording with the stall marked — not a narrated tour.
Run it yourself once so the brief is fair. Then have at least one independent person attempt it — a paid tester, not a friend who already knows the product. If two or three people hit the same wall, you have a pattern. Fix. Re-run the same brief. Do not invent a bigger study.
What does not count as a ship gate
- “I used it all morning” — you are not cold.
- “CI is green” alone — contracts ≠ finishability.
- An open Discord beta with no form — noise, not settlement.
- A twenty-minute exploratory session with no success criteria — you cannot approve or reject it.
If you cannot reject the evidence, you are not gating. You are hoping.
A one-page checklist you can reuse
- Name the ship decision (ship / hold / rewrite X).
- CI + smoke on this artifact.
- One cold human path with form + recording.
- Settle: approve, reject incomplete, or fix and re-run.
- Ship only when the scary path is no longer the blocker.
That is the whole department, sized for one person. Tomorrow’s risk gets a new mission — not a longer checklist.
On QATested
QA Testing on QATested is built for that second layer: a focused brief, paid independent testers, recordings, and approve/reject. How to post one: post a Structured QA test. Related: how indie developers run a paid QA test · brief, high-signal tests · structured QA vs an open beta.