QA & test automation
Functional testing, automated regression suites and performance work — built to be run by your team long after we've finished, not to create a dependency on ours.
Quality assurance is the practice of finding defects while they're still cheap — which means as close as possible to the moment they're written. Test automation is how you keep doing that as the codebase grows, without the testing effort growing with it.
The value isn't only in bugs found. A good automated suite is what makes a team willing to change things: without one, every release is a risk, so teams stop refactoring, work around problems instead of fixing them, and the system calcifies. With one, a developer can make a substantial change and know within minutes whether they broke something.
The most common failure we're asked to fix isn't too few tests — it's a suite so slow and flaky that the team has learned to ignore it. A red build nobody trusts is worse than no build at all.
They aren't stages of maturity. Mature teams do both, deliberately.
| Manual / exploratory | Automated | |
|---|---|---|
| Best at | Finding problems nobody thought to specify | Confirming known behaviour hasn't broken |
| Cost shape | Repeats every release | High to build, near-zero to re-run |
| Speed | Hours to days per cycle | Minutes, on every commit |
| Catches | Usability issues, visual problems, odd edge cases | Regressions, contract breaks, logic errors |
| Misses | Regressions in areas nobody re-tested | Anything nobody wrote a test for |
| Use it for | New features, risky changes, release sign-off | Everything that must keep working |
We automate the repetitive confirmation and keep humans on exploratory work — which is the opposite of what most teams do by default.
Six services, bought individually or as a programme.
Test strategy & audit
A read of what you test today, where the risk actually sits, and what to automate first. Usually finds that coverage is concentrated where bugs are cheapest.
Automated regression suites
End-to-end and integration suites in Playwright or Cypress, wired into CI so they run on every pull request rather than on a schedule nobody watches.
Functional & exploratory testing
Human testing of new features and release candidates, with reproducible bug reports rather than 'it doesn't work' tickets.
Performance & load testing
Finding where your system falls over before a campaign does it for you — with a profile of what breaks first and what it costs to fix.
API & contract testing
Verifying the interfaces between services, so a backend change can't silently break a mobile app that's still in the stores.
CI/CD test infrastructure
Making the suite fast, parallel and reliable enough that developers trust it — which is the only way tests actually get used.
The same defect gets dramatically more expensive the later it's found. This is the entire economic argument for QA.
While being written
The developer still has the whole context in their head. A failing unit test points at the exact line.
In code review or CI
Context switch back, reproduce, fix, re-review. Annoying but contained, and nothing has shipped.
In staging / QA
A bug report, triage, reproduction, fix, retest and a release decision — several people involved.
In production
Incident response, a hotfix, possibly data repair, customer communication, and the trust cost you can't invoice.
These are shapes, not benchmarks from your codebase — the ratio matters more than the absolute numbers, and the ratio is consistent across every team we've worked with.
Three shapes depending on whether you need a capability built or capacity added.
QA audit & strategy
A two-to-three week engagement producing an honest assessment of current coverage, the risk map, and a prioritised automation plan you can execute with or without us.
- Best for: teams that know quality is a problem but not where to start.
Automation build-out
We build the suite and the CI infrastructure, then train your team to own it. Explicitly designed to end — we're not trying to become permanent.
- Best for: teams with developers but no automation practice.
Embedded QA
QA engineers working inside your team on your release cycle, monthly. Testing new features, maintaining the suite and owning release sign-off.
- Best for: continuous release cycles where QA can't be a project.
Chosen to match your stack, because a suite your developers can't read is a suite they won't maintain.
End-to-end
- Playwright
- Cypress
- Detox (mobile)
Unit & integration
- Vitest
- Jest
- Pytest
- Testing Library
API & contract
- Postman / Newman
- REST Assured
- Pact
Performance
- k6
- JMeter
- Lighthouse CI
CI
- GitHub Actions
- GitLab CI
- Preview environments
Not all of it, and chasing a coverage percentage is usually counterproductive. We automate the paths where a regression costs real money — checkout, auth, payments, anything touching data integrity — and leave rarely-used cosmetic areas to exploratory testing. A focused suite that runs in four minutes gets used; a comprehensive one that takes forty gets skipped.
Start a project
The area you're most nervous to change is usually the right place to start. We'll tell you what it would take to make it safe.
- Reply within one business day
- Free scoping session, no obligation
- You keep the scope document either way