QA & test automation
Find it before your customers do
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.
We'll review your current test coverage free in the first session.
What QA and test automation actually deliver
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.
Manual and automated testing do different jobs
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.
What we do
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.
Why timing dominates cost
The same defect gets dramatically more expensive the later it's found. This is the entire economic argument for QA.
While being written
MinutesThe developer still has the whole context in their head. A failing unit test points at the exact line.
In code review or CI
An hour or twoContext switch back, reproduce, fix, re-review. Annoying but contained, and nothing has shipped.
In staging / QA
Half a day upwardA bug report, triage, reproduction, fix, retest and a release decision — several people involved.
In production
Days, plus the damageIncident 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.
How to engage us
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.
What we use
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
FAQ
QA & testing questions
How much of our application should be automated?
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.
Our test suite is slow and flaky. Can you fix it?
That's one of the most common engagements we take. Flakiness is almost always a small number of causes — timing assumptions, shared state between tests, real network calls. We find them, fix them, and parallelise the suite. Getting developers to trust the build again is usually worth more than adding new tests.
Do you replace our developers' testing?
No. Developers should keep writing unit tests for their own code — that's the fastest, cheapest layer and nobody else is better placed to write it. We build the layers above, set the strategy, and handle the exploratory and performance work most development teams don't have time for.
Can you test an application you didn't build?
Yes, and most of our QA work is on systems built by someone else. We start with a short discovery to understand the critical paths and the risk areas, which is usually where the audit finds its first surprises.
What do we get at the end?
The test suite in your repository, running in your CI, with documentation on how to add to it and how to debug a failure. Plus the strategy document and risk map. Everything is designed for your team to own — we'd rather be re-engaged for the next thing than depended on for this one.
Is QA outsourcing to India cost-effective for a small team?
For most small teams, an automation build-out is better value than an ongoing outsourced QA headcount. You get a suite that runs free forever, rather than a recurring cost that scales with your release frequency. We'll tell you honestly which fits your situation.
Related services
Tell us what keeps breaking
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.