What you get

The easiest way to describe the Foundational service is "Lead QA Plus". Think of it as hiring a Lead QA, plus gaining advanced insights, strategic guidance, and long-term support from a team that has done this dozens of times.

You work with an experienced testing expert who will:

✔ identify high value areas to start testing

✔ choose testing stacks that suit your team

✔ advice teams on ways to improve testability

✔ expand the scope of test automation

• Data Quality • Contract tests • Service Virtualization

✔ integrate test automation with your CI/CD pipeline(s)

✔ collaboratively create a suitable test strategy

✔ embed themselves within your agile teams

Engagement model

Every startup's needs are different, so the engagement model has several variations. But, over the years, we have noticed that the starting point for our work seems similar. Companies looking for this kind of service have likely tried their best to manage their testing but find themselves overburdened. That's why the first 12-16 weeks of our engagement usually follow a similar path to get you back on track before we customize the engagement model to suit your needs.

You'll notice that we almost always start by flushing out major bugs, adding automation for the most critical areas, enhancing testability and boosting your team's testing IQ - all essential elements of a solid foundation. We focus on this preparatory work before developing a test strategy because a good strategy needs to be collaborative. Once your team is in a stronger position, our expert will customize the approach to meet your specific needs.

We go well beyond "Test Automation"

(Sorry to go text heavy! This section is for engineering decision makers ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ )

We specialise in technical testing, so even if you have a complex application that seems beyond the scope of regular QA, we're probably equipped to handle it. Whatever the challenge, there's a good chance we've tackled something similar before. For engineering leaders reading this, here are several examples of technical testing (as of 2022) that we identified, proposed and implemented at clients:

✔ Created a Docker container with simulated devices using snmpsim.
  Impact: Enabled a team of testers write repeatable tests for a dashboard feature.

✔ Developed a microservice to track release version and dependencies.
  Impact: The TestOps team could handle upgrades more efficiently.

✔ Introduced model evaluation scores as part of test snapshots.
  Impact: Assisted the MLOPs team in the early days and was later integrated into the product!

✔ Virtualized several third party integrations to aid in testing.
  Impact: Isolated testing the core of a product from it's integrations. enabled testing on local systems.

✔ Implemented data quality tests and added several useful metrics to Prometheus.
  Impact: Shed light into the problems an AI/ML team was having integrating with other teams.

✔ Built a PDF diff tool for a specific case.
  Impact: Gave our client confidence that a major upgrade did not break the vast reporting capabilities of their product.

✔ Started a team of "manual testers" on ModResponse, a browser plugin.
  Impact: This no-code approach allowed them to test edge cases without having to setup data in the database.

Key differentiators

Most testing companies do not provide this service since it is low volume, but we do. And not just that, we go beyond standard test automation and use modern tools and techniques that suit early stage teams. To do this, behind the scenes, we may bring in multiple experts to cover specialized or unique asks, making sure all your testing challenges are expertly addressed. Our approach emphasizes testability, fosters team ownership of testing and promotes a collaborative test strategy. We offer both hands-on support and high-level guidance - for a price point well below hiring a full-time QA lead.