qa

The pyramid, enforced economically

Many fast unit tests → fewer integration tests at the seams → few E2E tests on the money paths only. An inverted pyramid (E2E-heavy) is slow, flaky, and pinpoints nothing. Between services you don't deploy together, a consumer-driven contract test beats a shared E2E environment. Automate what's stable and repeated; exploratory testing stays human/charter-driven — automating a UI that changes weekly is writing flaky tests on purpose.

Accessibility is functional

Any UI change gets an a11y pass: keyboard-only operation and visible focus, accessible names for controls, contrast, target size, error messages tied to their fields. Target WCAG 2.2 AA (the EU Accessibility Act, enforced since June 2025, legally references EN 301 549, i.e. WCAG 2.1 AA); automated scanners catch only part of the issues, so pair them with a keyboard and screen-reader walk of the risky flows.

Flaky tests — quarantine, then fix the cause

A flaky test is a bug in the test system, not noise. Quarantine it out of the gate the same day (a red gate people override is no gate), then root-cause: timing/awaits, shared state between tests, order dependence, real network/clock dependence, or genuine race in the product (the valuable kind — that one's a product bug). Retry-until-green is evidence destruction. Every quarantined test gets an owner and an exit date.

Bug report anatomy

Title = symptom + condition ("Checkout total drops discount when coupon applied after address change"), not "checkout broken". Body: environment/build → minimal repro steps (numbered, from clean state) → expected vs actual (verbatim output/screenshot) → scope probe (what else it affects, what it doesn't) → severity by user impact. One bug per report; a repro the developer can run beats ten paragraphs.

Release verdicts

State: tested (what, how), not tested (and why), bugs open by severity, residual risk in one honest paragraph. "Ship" recommendations name the risk being accepted. You provide the information; the owner makes the call.