Ship more,
break less

Releases are not a vibe. We build test pyramids that hold the expected shape, QA agents that catch the quiet regressions, release gates with named owners and an on-call lead who signs the go / no-go.

See capabilities Scope a QA engagement
Test pyramid on the left, release gate flow on the right with pass checks qa.pyramid + gates all green unit · integration · e2e · release Test pyramid Unit · property ~70% Integration ~22% E2E · visual ~8% Release gates Code review · 2 approvals ✓ Test suite green ✓ Visual regression ✓ Staging eval ✓ Canary SLO hold ✓ Human sign-off pending Signals · 30d coverage 74% flake rate 0.6%

CAPABILITIES

Six surfaces under one release contract

Tests, regression, QA agents, staging, release gates, human approval — engineered together. Releases ship on a document with named owners, not on a ship-it emoji.

01

Automated test suite

Unit, integration, end-to-end, visual regression. Every commit runs against the same contract; nothing merges without it.

02

Regression coverage

Golden scenarios, snapshot diffs, API contract pacts. A bug that got through once never gets through again.

03

QA agents

AI-driven exploratory testing, accessibility probes, flake classifiers. Human reviewers spend their time on judgement, not clicking through happy paths.

04

Staging checks

Shadow traffic, performance smoke tests, data-parity audit. The gap between staging and production closed before release.

05

Release gates

Go / no-go criteria in writing, canary thresholds, automatic rollback triggers. A release is a document, not a vibe.

06

Human approval

The last gate is a person with authority and context. Automation routes the work; humans take the decision on anything non-trivial.

TEST PYRAMID

Three layers, clear ratio, deliberate inversion

Every codebase has a test shape. Most have it wrong — too much E2E, too little unit. We reshape the pyramid on the first sprint so CI stays fast, flakes stay rare and coverage stays honest.

E2E · visual~8%

Golden user journeys · Playwright · visual regression · a11y probes

Integration · contract~22%

API pact · DB fixtures · message queue shapes · flag-toggled scenarios

Unit · property~70%

Pure functions · property-based (hypothesis, fast-check) · edge & error paths

Release is a document

Every release lands under the six gates below. Gate 6 is always a person with authority — that is the difference between a release and a deploy.

See release gate table ↘

RELEASE GATES

Six gates, explicit owners, explicit blockers

The generic release-gate table we instantiate for most production releases. Every row names an owner and the action it blocks if it fails. Nothing hidden behind a tribal "yeah it's fine".

GateOwned byBlocks
Code review · 2 approversEngineeringMerge
Test suite greenCIMerge
Visual regression cleanQA agentMerge
Staging eval passesRelease botCanary
Canary SLO hold · 10 minObservabilityRollout
Human sign-off · namedOn-call leadRelease

STACK

Unit · integration · e2e · release

Default toolkit across the four test and release lanes. Substitutions happen per engagement.

Unit · integration

  • Vitest · Jest · pytest
  • PHPUnit · JUnit · Go test
  • Property-based (fast-check, hypothesis)

E2E · visual

  • Playwright · Cypress
  • Percy · Chromatic · Applitools
  • a11y: axe-core · Pa11y

Contract · API

  • Pact · Spectral
  • OpenAPI conformance
  • Schemathesis · Dredd

Release · observe

  • LaunchDarkly · GrowthBook flags
  • Argo Rollouts · Flagger
  • OpenTelemetry · Honeycomb · Sentry

Adjacent disciplines

Where QA connects

Platform

DevOps & Cloud Infrastructure

CI/CD, deployment automation and SLOs that the release gates run against.

 Code

Code & Performance Refactoring

Test harness retrofits and regression coverage on legacy codebases.

 ML

MLOps & Governance

Eval suites, drift detection and canary gates adapted for ML systems.

 Security

Cyber Security & Risk Ops

SAST, DAST, dependency scans and supply-chain gates on the release pipeline.
Test · gate · sign

Make every release boring on purpose

Share the codebase (under NDA), the current test shape and the incident history. We come back with a pyramid audit, release-gate draft and 90-day reshape plan inside ten working days.

Start a QA engagementOr open DevOps