Advisory
A Better Plan,Not Just More Hands
Fixed-scope audits, Automation assessments, test strategy, and fractional QA leadership, when the problem is direction, not capacity.
What We Advise On
Six Engagements, One Deliverable: Clarity
Every engagement ends with a written report your team can execute, with us or without us.
QA Process Audit
A fixed-scope review of how your team tests today: coverage, gates, tooling, and reporting. You get written findings, a prioritized roadmap, and honest calls on what to stop doing, delivered within days, yours to act on with or without us.
Automation Assessment
We read your suite the way a mechanic reads an engine: flake sources, selector strategy, data isolation, CI wiring, and run economics. The output is a stabilize-vs-rebuild recommendation backed by evidence from your own runs.
Test Strategy Design
A right-sized quality strategy for your product and release cadence: what to automate first, where Manual judgment stays, which gates block a release, and the metrics that tell you it's working.
Fractional QA Leadership
Senior QA leadership a few days a month: release-gate ownership, hiring input, vendor oversight, and board-readable quality reporting, for teams that need direction more than headcount.
Release Readiness Review
A pre-launch pass over a specific release: risk map, gap list, and a go/no-go recommendation with the evidence behind it. Useful before a major launch, migration, or audit.
AI Testing Readiness
Shipping LLM features without an evaluation harness? We assess your prompts, RAG pipeline, and agent flows against our AI Quality Engineering checklist and hand you the plan to make 'it seems fine' a measured number.
How It Works
From Scoping Call to Findings Walkthrough
Scoping Call
30 minutes on your product, your pain, and what a useful outcome looks like. We confirm scope and a fixed price before anything starts.
Evidence Gathering
We read your suites, pipelines, defect history, and release notes, and talk to the people who live with them. NDA-protected throughout.
Findings & Roadmap
A written report: what's working, what's costing you time, and a prioritized plan with effort estimates. No filler, no vendor-speak.
Walkthrough
We present the findings to your team, answer the hard questions, and leave the report with you, whether or not we do the follow-on work.
When the problem is not more Testing
Some quality problems are not solved by adding coverage.
Some quality problems are not solved by adding coverage. A team can have a large suite, competent testers and a CI pipeline, and still ship defects, miss deadlines and argue about release readiness, because the problem is where the gates are, who decides, what evidence exists, and which risks nobody has articulated. Adding tests to that situation adds cost without changing the outcome.
QA consulting exists to answer those questions before anybody writes another test. It is deliberately independent of execution work: we are equally willing to conclude that your Testing is fine and the actual constraint is environment reliability, requirement ambiguity or release governance. An audit that always recommends buying more of the auditor's services is not an audit.
What an audit actually examines
Coverage versus risk: what is tested, what is not, and whether the distribution reflects what would genuinely hurt if it broke. Most suites are deep where change is easy and thin where consequence is high.
The release gate: what must pass before a merge, a release candidate and a production deploy, and whether those gates are believed or routinely bypassed.
Suite health: runtime budgets, flake rate, and whether a red build triggers investigation or a re-run. Trust is measurable, and its absence is the most common finding.
Environments and data: whether staging resembles production, whether test data carries the shapes that cause defects, and how often failures are blamed on the environment.
Process seams: where requirements become ambiguous, where defects stall, and where Testing starts too late to influence anything.
Skills and ownership: who owns the framework, the gate and the release decision, and what happens when that person is unavailable.
Fractional QA leadership
Many teams need QA leadership more than they need QA headcount.
Many teams need QA leadership more than they need QA headcount. A fractional engagement puts a Senior QA leader alongside your engineering management for an agreed commitment: setting strategy, designing the release gate, reviewing coverage decisions, mentoring in-house testers, and holding the quality position in planning conversations where it would otherwise go unrepresented.
It suits organisations too small to justify a full-time head of quality, teams between QA leads, and companies whose engineering leadership is strong but has no Testing background. The output is a team that makes better quality decisions on its own, which is a different goal from a vendor that becomes structurally necessary.
The output is a decision, not a document
Every consulting engagement ends with findings written for the people who have to act on them: what is working and should be left alone, what is costing you time or risk, what to change first, and what the change is likely to cost.
Every consulting engagement ends with findings written for the people who have to act on them: what is working and should be left alone, what is costing you time or risk, what to change first, and what the change is likely to cost. Recommendations are sequenced by return rather than presented as an undifferentiated list, and where the right answer is 'do this yourselves' or 'you do not need a vendor for this', we say so.
If you would rather see the shape of the work before commissioning it, the free assessment is a shorter version of the same discipline, a Senior review of your Testing setup with written findings and no pitch attached.
Deliverables
What you get
Artefacts you keep and can run without us. Everything lives in your repositories and your tooling.
Handover pack
6 artefacts · yours to keep
A written audit of coverage, gates, suite health, environments and process
Risk-ranked findings sequenced by return rather than by severity alone
A test strategy document your team can execute without us
Release-gate design: what runs when, and what blocks what
Tooling and stack recommendations with the cost of each path stated
Fractional QA leadership on an agreed commitment where that is the gap
Self-check
Signs your team needs this
If more than one of these is true, it is usually cheaper to fix now than after the next release.
Quality is a recurring argument and nobody has the evidence to settle it
There is a large suite, competent people, and defects still reach production
Release readiness is decided by opinion rather than a coverage picture
You are between QA leads, or have never had one
A previous vendor recommended exactly what they sell
Somebody has proposed a rewrite and nobody has costed the alternative
A Senior Engineer replies within one business day. NDA first.
Questions
Frequently Asked Questions
Straight answers, written the way we'd say them on a call.
Still curious? Talk to usKeep reading
Where to go next
The services and resources teams read next.
Get an Honest Read on Your QA
Tell us where quality hurts, we'll scope a fixed-price engagement and tell you exactly what you'll get back.
- A Senior Engineer replies, not a sales layer
- Within one business day, every time
- NDA available before you share any details
16+
Years QA leadership
16
Testing disciplines
6
Markets served
1
Business day to reply
Tell us where quality hurts
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