Test pyramid design
A written split of unit, integration and end-to-end coverage with target counts per layer, so effort goes to the tests that catch the most defects per second.
Delivery Automation
Automated Testing & Quality Gates
Tests that run on every pull request and stop bad merges before review ends.
The work
What this actually does
A test suite is a liability until it is trusted. We make the fast tests run first on every pull request, fail with an error message that names the broken thing, and finish in minutes rather than in the background of your afternoon. Coverage is measured where it matters, not as a single number across the whole repository.
Flaky tests get quarantined with an owner and a deadline instead of being muted and forgotten, because one test that fails at random teaches engineers to ignore the whole suite. End-to-end coverage stays thin and deliberate, backed by contract tests between services, so a slow browser suite never becomes the reason a merge waits.
If any of these sound familiar
- The test suite takes forty minutes, so nobody waits for it
- Flaky tests get muted, and then the real failures get muted too
- Coverage is reported but no one agrees what number is acceptable
- Bugs reach production that a cheaper test would have caught
Scope
What's included
Every engagement on this page covers the following, sized to your setup rather than delivered as a fixed package. If something here is not relevant to you, it comes off the scope and off the price.
Flaky test quarantine
Failing-at-random tests are moved to a tracked quarantine lane with an owner and an expiry date, keeping the main suite green and honest.
Parallel test sharding
The suite is split across runners by timing data, so the wall-clock time stays close to the slowest shard rather than the sum of all tests.
Coverage policy
Thresholds set per package and enforced on changed lines, so a pull request cannot lower coverage in the area it touches without a recorded exception.
Realistic test data
Seeded, anonymised datasets generated per run, so integration tests exercise real shapes and edge cases without copying production records into a lower environment.
Failure triage reporting
Dashboards showing which tests fail most, how long each stage takes and where reruns happen, giving you the evidence to fix the suite rather than tolerate it.
What changes
What teams typically see
6 minMedian pull request feedback
3xFaster suite wall-clock time
0Silently muted tests
Handover
What you keep
Everything produced during the engagement is yours: the repositories, the accounts, the documentation. There is no proprietary layer and nothing to unlicense if you take the work in-house.
- Test strategy document with layer targets and ownership
- Merge-blocking gate configuration in your CI provider
- Quarantine process and triage dashboard for flaky tests
- Parallelised test jobs with sharding and caching enabled
- Coverage policy file and exception register
Tooling
Tools we use here
A starting point, not a requirement. We work in whatever you already run wherever it does the job.
GitHub
GitLab
Jenkins
SonarQube
Docker
Kubernetes
Snyk
How it runs
From first call to handover
The same four steps on every engagement. You see each one before it starts and can stop at any of them.
- 01
Measure the current suite
We time each stage, count the failures, and identify which tests fail most often and which take longest, before recommending any change.
- 02
Set the quality policy
Agree with your team what blocks a merge, what warns, and what gets recorded as an exception, so the gate is a decision rather than an accident.
- 03
Restructure and parallelise
Split the suite by speed and purpose, shard it across parallel runners, and add caching where setup dominates the runtime of every job.
- 04
Tune against real pull requests
We watch the first fortnight of genuine merges, track false failures, adjust thresholds and quarantine rules, then train your team on the triage routine.
Questions
Asked before we start
Will a stricter gate slow us down?
The opposite is usually true. A gate that catches a broken change in six minutes costs a rework cycle; the same defect found during release costs a rollback and an incident call. We tune thresholds so the gate blocks genuine problems and warns on the rest.
Our coverage number is already high. Is there anything to fix?
A high number often means a lot of assertions that only check a function returns without throwing. We look at what the coverage protects, add integration tests where it is thin, and would rather lower the headline figure than keep tests that prove nothing.
Can you fix flaky tests we wrote years ago?
Usually, yes, but it is unglamorous work. Some flakes come from shared state or missing waits and are quick to fix; others hide a genuine race condition in application code. Where a test is not worth repairing we retire it and say so.
Do we need to run tests in Kubernetes?
Not by default. Unit and integration tests are faster and cheaper on plain runners. Containerised environments help for end-to-end tests that need real dependencies, and we only add that layer where it earns its cost.
Delivery Automation
Often needed alongside this
Delivery Automation
CI/CD Pipeline Engineering
Automated build, test and deploy pipelines that turn every commit into a repeatable, auditable release.
- GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Jenkins & Azure Pipelines
- Parallel builds, caching and artifact promotion
- Quality gates, approvals and rollback on failure
Security & Compliance
DevSecOps & Compliance
Security checks wired into the pipeline, so vulnerabilities are caught in review instead of in production.
- SAST, DAST, dependency and container scanning
- Secrets management with Vault, KMS and SOPS
- Policy as code and audit-ready evidence trails
Platform & Containers
Ephemeral & Preview Environments
A real, isolated environment spun up per pull request and torn down on merge — sharing nothing with production.
- Per-branch environments from pull request to merge
- Seeded, anonymised test data
- Automatic teardown to keep the cloud bill flat
Worth a conversation about Automated Testing & Quality Gates?
Bring the specific problem. We will tell you honestly whether this is the service that fixes it, and what it would take.