Quality & Reliability

Staying fast without breaking the things people depend on.

Testing, deploys, observability, incidents, and security, treated as accelerators rather than as taxes on shipping.

intro

A testing strategy for people who ship

Tests exist to let you change things confidently. Any test that doesn't increase your willingness to deploy on a Friday is overhead.

0-5 · 5-20 · 20-50 · 50-150 · 150+

core

SLOs you'll actually honour

An SLO you won't stop feature work to defend is a decoration. Set two or three, mean them, and write down what happens when the budget is gone before you need it.

20-50 · 50-150 · 150+

core

Incident response under pressure

Mitigate first, understand second. During an incident, clear roles and honest communication matter more than technical brilliance.

5-20 · 20-50 · 50-150 · 150+

core

Postmortems without blame theatre

Blameless isn't a tone, it's a method: keep asking what made the wrong action look reasonable at the time. Every incident gets one, including the near misses.

5-20 · 20-50 · 50-150 · 150+

core

The deploy pipeline as a safety net

Optimise for rollback speed, not release care. Every change behind a flag, no persistent staging, and a release that's just a merge.

0-5 · 5-20 · 20-50 · 50-150 · 150+

core

Observability before you need it

You cannot retrofit visibility during an outage. Instrument the few things that answer "is it working for users right now", and do it before you need the answer.

5-20 · 20-50 · 50-150 · 150+

core

Security posture for small teams

There's a short list of controls that prevents almost every realistic outcome. Do that list completely, and don't start anything else until it's done.

0-5 · 5-20 · 20-50 · 50-150