Inside Givebacks’ journey from zero testers to a quality-first culture, shared at Quality Sense Conf in Uruguay by Alexa Altez from Abstracta and Matt Harrell from Givebacks.
The post-lunch slot at Quality Sense Conf in Uruguay is not usually where one expects a confession. Yet that was exactly how Matt Harrell, co-founder of US-based K-12 platform Givebacks, chose to open a talk.
Standing on stage next to Alexa Altez from Abstracta, he admitted that for years the company had grown rapidly, handling millions of dollars in school payments, without a formal testing team.
“We had zero testers. We had no formal QA process,” he told the room. Product owners did some checks, smoke tests ran before releases, and the business moved on. “Looking back on it,” he added, “I really don’t know how we did that.”
The session, part of the 2025 edition of Quality Sense Conf, held on November 11th at the Radisson Hotel, in Montevideo, Uruguay, quickly turned into a live case study of what happens when startup habits collide with high-stakes reality.
From Small PTA Platform to Critical Infrastructure
Givebacks started in 2008 to build best-in-class software to help nonprofits and volunteer-led organizations work smarter, and raise more money. In 2018, it was “pretty much a membership management platform” for Parent Teacher Associations, as Matt described.
That year, the company served around 1,000 PTAs (Parent Teacher Associations), processed roughly three million dollars in payment volume, and operated with two developers and one support representative.
By 2023, the picture had changed. Givebacks had evolved into an “all-in-one parent engagement and fundraising platform,” used by around 11,000 school PTAs and moving about 80 million dollars through several products. The engineering team had grown to five developers, with product managers and a larger support crew.
What had not changed was the testing model. There were still no dedicated QA specialists.
The company, Matt said, had “subscribed to this ‘move fast and break things’” philosophy. “We were moving fast and we were breaking a lot of things.”
When “Break Things” Becomes Risky
The breaking point arrived in 2024 during the back-to-school season, the most sensitive period in Givebacks’ yearly cycle. The team had reworked major modules, including membership functionality that local PTAs rely on to report data to their state organizations.
“We had broken that,” Matt told the QSConf audience. The result was a string of critical bugs affecting customers at the worst possible time. State-level partnerships, such as one with New York State PTA, were suddenly under pressure as schools struggled to obtain the information they needed.
“Our support ticket volume was skyrocketing up as well. We had frustrated customers, burned-out customer support agents, and tired product teams. Product owners were running around trying to figure out, “We have to fix this now, we have to fix that there.” We had a disappointed executive team. Everyone was disappointed with some of these things that were happening”, he remembered.
The brand perception, Matt recalled, started to sound like this: “Givebacks is great, they have this great platform, we need to use it. They have some bugs, but they fix them.”
“I just remember thinking so many times,” he said on stage, “is that what we want to be known for?”
The No-code Shortcut that Wasn’t
In the aftermath, the leadership team agreed on one thing: “We need QA.” The first concrete option that appeared was an AI-based, no-code automation platform offered by a local entrepreneur.
The pitch was familiar to many in the QSConf audience: automate hundreds of tests in a few months, “ship faster, ship better,” and require only minimal time from internal staff. According to Matt, the vendor suggested they could automate around 600 tests in three months with “15 minutes from one person on your team a week.”
“You can imagine how that value proposition landed,” he said, especially with the CEO. The idea that a tool could “check that box and we’ll have all our testing done” was powerful.
Givebacks agreed to a 15-day proof of concept. The vendor’s software generated about 100 tests for the memberships module, a critical area they could not afford to break again. When both sides met to review the outcome, enthusiasm cooled.
Matt described the result as “uncertain.” Some test cases were “shallow,” not covering full user journeys. Parts of the coverage overlapped, and “they just missed some critical user flows altogether.” Engineers, he added, struggled with the opacity of the system: “There was little transparency in the code and engineering was just kind of confused… what did it do?”
He told the room he could imagine this kind of tool working well on a simple app with “only three or four user flows.” On Givebacks’ multi-module platform, which handles money for schools, the team concluded “this isn’t going to work.”
A Different Offer: “We Are Your Allies in Quality”
Around the same time, Givebacks was introduced to Abstracta, recommended by another company. The framing was different from the automation pitch. Abstracta presented itself as “your allies in quality” and proposed starting with a maturity assessment instead of tools.
According to Matt, this was not a traditional slide-deck exercise. Abstracta’s team joined sprint meetings, spoke with engineers and product owners, and “were immediately sort of embedding themselves into the organization and just observing.”
The assessment surfaced a conclusion that shifted the internal conversation. “We didn’t have a QA problem,” Matt said. “We really had a delivery problem.”
The company was missing release dates, shipping bugs during peak seasons, and struggling with silos. Automation alone was not going to solve that.
Out of the assessment came a 90-day plan. Alexa, representing Abstracta on stage, described it as “a plan that outlined every single thing that we were going to be doing for the following 90 days to start building this foundation,” from selecting a test case management strategy to defining how critical test cases would be written.
Incremental Changes: When Process Meets People
The plan looked solid. Implementation was another story.
One of the early changes focused on how bugs were reported. Until then, defects were logged as comments inside the main user story in the tracking tool. Abstracta proposed a more structured approach.
“The thing is people had worked for months or even years following that process,” Alexa recalled. “And suddenly some outsiders appeared to say, ‘Oh, you need to change this.’”
Looking back, she framed this as a classic trap in transformation projects: focusing on tools and best-practice checklists while underestimating the impact on people’s habits and routines. “We focused so much on the tools, the good practices, what the book says, but we forgot about the people, instead of trying to collaborate with them.”
The resistance was not only about bug workflows, Givebacks also had to confront its internal assumptions about responsibility. “QA is not solely responsible for bugs” became a key message that, in Matt’s words, required “a mindset shift,” from a blame culture to a quality culture.
Despite having cross-functional product pods, “engineering, product and QA were not crossing, they were not mixing very well,” he said. Blame circulated in familiar patterns: incomplete requirements, missing acceptance criteria, edge cases that slipped through.
Progress came through incremental changes: inviting the VP of Engineering into the channel where automated test runs were posted, asking functional testers to speak up in sprint reviews and grooming sessions, and involving founders directly in discussions about risk and expectations.
Numbers, and a Refusal to Pretend the Story Is Over
After more than a year of collaboration, Givebacks can point to measurable changes.
“We now have over 2,000 test cases. We’ve got some level of automation on about 90% and they have found literally over 500 defects caught before the release went out,” Matt said.
At the same time, he chose not to present a tidy success story. “I’d love to sit here and say, ‘We had bugs and then we partnered with Abstracta, and we don’t have any more bugs,’” he told the audience. “But the reality is that even this back-to-school season we had several bugs that still made it to production.”
Those incidents led to “a deep root cause analysis,” prompted also by the CEO’s blunt question about why, despite the investment, bugs remained. The analysis reinforced an idea Matt repeated several times: “It’s not just a QA thing.” Many causes live on the product and engineering side, and in how teams work together.
Giving Change a Place to Live
One Giveback’s structural response has been the creation of a change management, a structured approach to transitioning from a current state to a future state.
Matt remembered his team sitting with so many needed changes, just wondering, “Where do we start? How do we do that?” So, as Matt stated, they created this change management function “because change management is about people. It’s about shepherding people through all the changes”.
Building on that internal effort, the company now maintains a backlog of changes related to quality and delivery. Items are ranked, and representatives from engineering, product, QA and delivery meet to discuss them.
The practice grew out of an internal Givebacks initiative. Abstracta’s ongoing assessments and root cause analysis contributed insights that were translated into concrete, actionable backlog items.
“Now, all these things that we’re learning and trying to change to be quality-focused and customer-centric are going through change management. We’re talking with everyone involved:
What is changing?
Why does this matter?
Who is impacted?
What is adoption going to be like? Is it going to be smooth? Is it going to be measurable?
This is very new. This management function in our organization has been huge to supplement what we’re doing from a quality standpoint and to drive some of this change forward,” he concluded.
Lessons for Leaders Listening in
The session closed with several pieces of advice from Matt and Alexa, aimed especially at business and product leaders who were attending the Quality Sense Conf.
Alexa, for her part, left the audience with three conclusions:
- Good practices, tools, and processes are insufficient if we don’t consider the people who are going to get involved in them.
- Change requires patience
- Collaboration must include everyone involved in the product, not just the traditional triad of product, development and QA.
Matt encouraged them to educate themselves on the latest quality trends, to “be able to talk the talk” when trying to introduce quality practices in an existing organization.
He also suggested preparing for pushback: “Anticipate what your engineering lead is going to come back with. Anticipate what your product owners are going to have a problem with.”
On the metrics side, he shared a moment that simplified a complex dashboard discussion. One co-founder, Bobby, told the team he simply wanted to “stop shipping regression bugs” and listed three priorities. For Matt, that was a reminder to “keep it simple” when framing ROI for quality initiatives.
In a Nutshell
The story Matt and Alexa brought to Quality Sense Conf was not about a magical tool or a perfect framework. It was about a company discovering sometimes the hard way, that scaling quality means changing how work is done, how responsibility is shared, and how uncomfortable conversations are handled, on and off stage.
By 2025, Givebacks has become the leading giving and payments ecosystem for the K–12 market.
About Givebacks
Givebacks leads in philanthropic technology, helping schools, nonprofits, and brands integrate giving into daily life. Their platform enables fundraising for over 14,000 nonprofits, fostering a culture of giving while unlocking innovative ways to raise funds.
- Founded in 2008 with the launch of MemberHub.
- Headquarters in Raleigh, North Carolina.
- Supports 61 school districts and 42 state PTAs in the U.S., with more than 14,000 connected stripe accounts and over 115 million dollars in annual payment volume.
- Engages over 5 million parents
- Partners with 10,000+ restaurants and 15,000 online retailers.
- Supports year-round passive fundraising through unique “Shop to Give” programs.
Our collaboration with Givebacks resulted in a significant transformation of their QA processes, driving measurable improvements in product quality, team efficiency, and user experience. We invite you to read our case study.
About Abstracta
With nearly 2 decades of experience and a global presence, Abstracta is a leading technology solutions company with offices in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Chile, Colombia, and Uruguay. We specialize in AI-driven solutions development and end-to-end software testing services.
Our expertise spans across industries. We believe that actively bonding ties propels us further and helps us enhance our clients’ software. That’s why we’ve built robust partnerships with industry leaders, Microsoft, Datadog, Tricentis, Perforce BlazeMeter, Saucelabs, and PractiTest, to provide the latest in cutting-edge technology.
Embrace quality, cost-effectiveness through Abstracta quality solutions.
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