How YC Hit 90 % Coverage on Its Mission‑Critical Applications Portal

• 90 % test coverage across the entire application flow in just 14 days
• 100 + manual QA hours saved every funding‑batch deadline
• Critical bug caught the Sunday night before peak submissions, preventing an outage for thousands of founders

“It’s day and night now with Spur. I never thought testing could be made this simple.” — Ev, Product Designer

“We receive thousands of applications every batch with only two engineers maintaining the flow.”Manual bug‑bashes and spreadsheets before each deadline were error‑prone and time‑consuming. Subtle breakages could slip through just when stakes were highest.

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For an accelerator that reviews thousands of startup applications on tight deadlines, even a tiny glitch can block founders—or flood support—and erode YC’s brand. The applications team faced three major QA hurdles:

• Branching, Multi‑Step Logic: Dozens of conditional sections (co‑founder details, video links, traction metrics, visa questions, etc.) generate hundreds of unique applicant paths—far too many for manual test scripts to exhaustively cover.
• Lean Engineering Bandwidth: With just two engineers maintaining the portal and four batches a year, the team couldn’t spare days for spreadsheet‑driven bug‑bashes before every deadline.
• Surge‑Deadline Volume: Tens of thousands of founders submit within the final 24 hours of each batch, so performance and reliability must hold up precisely when traffic peaks.

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Spur’s AI‑powered agents simulate real applicants end‑to‑end:
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1. Rapid, comprehensive testing—90% coverage in two weeks.
2. Record‑to‑test workflow—Ev records a flow, Spur writes the test.
3. Adaptive “Applicant” agents that handle every field/state change with zero script maintenance.
4. Instant Slack alerts so issues are fixed before founders ever notice.