Launch day QA with six people and one spreadsheet

Picture the QA sheet four hours before launch. Dozens of rows. A bunch of them are the same bug written three different ways. Several just say "see screenshot", and the screenshot is sitting in someone's Downloads folder. There's a status column, and nobody has touched it since Tuesday.

I like spreadsheets, I really do. The trouble is that a spreadsheet pulls the problem away from the page. Each row needs a link, a description of where on the page to look, and a picture stored somewhere else entirely. Writing all that is the slow bit, and it's also where duplicates sneak in, because you can't see that somebody already reported the same button.

Try it on the pages instead

Give the six of you one Lasso collection and split the site up. When you spot a problem, click it and type a note, and Lasso grabs the screenshot. Everybody's notes appear as pins on the same pages, so when you land on a button that already has a pin, you add a reply instead of reporting it a fourth time.

Whoever's fixing things works through the open notes, and each one takes them straight to the right spot. Fixed something? Resolve it and it drops off the open list. Come launch morning, "are we ready?" finally has a straight answer. Either the list is empty or it isn't.

Bring the checklist along

Pair this with a website launch checklist, so people know what to hunt for, and use Lasso purely for writing down what they find.