Start Here
Test Automation
Your team ships on Friday without anyone staying late to check whether it broke.
What this engagement is
Most teams don't lack tests — they lack tests they trust. Suites grow ad hoc, coverage concentrates in the easy places, and the slow, flaky ones get skipped until the whole thing is decoration. Releases slow down not because testing takes time, but because nobody believes the results, so everything gets checked twice: once by the suite and once by a person.
We treat the suite as a deliverable with a number attached. Before any test is written, we audit your codebase, identify the paths that carry revenue and regulatory risk, and agree a coverage target for those paths in writing. We then build unit, integration, and end-to-end tests against that target, wire them into your CI pipeline with pass/fail gates, and keep the runtime short enough that nobody is tempted to bypass it. Flaky tests are investigated and fixed as defects — a suite you have to retry is a suite you've already stopped trusting.
The engagement ends when your developers can extend the suite without us. That means documented conventions, a sensible directory structure, fixtures they can reuse, and working sessions where we write new tests together before we leave.
Who this is for
- Teams whose release cadence has slowed because manual QA is the bottleneck
- Codebases where a small change routinely breaks something unrelated
- Products heading into an audit, certification, or enterprise procurement review
What you get
- Test suite hitting the agreed coverage target on critical paths
- CI pipeline configuration with pass/fail gates
- Documented testing conventions and directory structure
- A prioritized list of defects found during the work
- Two working sessions with your developers on maintaining the suite
Scope
Exactly what the quoted price covers
The scope document for this engagement lists both columns below in writing. Nothing moves between them without a conversation.
Included in the engagement
- Audit of existing tests, coverage, and CI setup
- Unit, integration, and end-to-end tests for the agreed critical paths
- Test fixtures, factories, and seed data for repeatable runs
- CI wiring: the suite runs on every push and blocks merges on failure
- Defect report for everything the new tests uncover
Not included
- Fixing the defects the tests reveal — quoted separately if you want us to
- Load and performance testing (a different discipline, quoted on its own)
- Testing third-party systems you don't control
Working together
What we need from you
Fixed dates only hold when both sides show up. These are the commitments we ask for in exchange for ours.
- 01
Repository access and a working CI account
- 02
A developer who knows the system available for roughly two hours a week
- 03
A staging environment that resembles production
Process
How it runs
- 01
Coverage audit
We map what's tested, what isn't, and which untested paths carry the most risk. You get the target number and the reasoning behind it.
- 02
Harness and CI
Test infrastructure, fixtures, and pipeline wiring go in first, so every test written after this point runs automatically.
- 03
Suite build
Tests are written against the prioritized paths in weekly increments. You see the coverage number move every Friday.
- 04
Handover
Conventions documented, sessions run with your developers, and the suite handed over green.
Also in Start Here
Scope a test automation engagement.
Send us the situation in a few sentences. You'll get a scope, a price, and a date back — or an honest no.