QA Roast
Roast My Release
A QA partnership, not a vendor

Get a QA partner who tells you what's actually broken.

I embed in your team and run the QA your test suite was supposed to be. Humans orchestrate. AI connects the dots between business intent, real users, and the agents now writing half your code.

Roast My ReleaseSee how we work

Reply within 1 business day · No demo, no slides · Receipts on the first call

PlaywrightCypressVitestJestDetoxMaestroStorybookGitHub ActionsCircleCIDatadogSentryPostHogStripeAuth0SupabaseVercelFly.ioPlanetScalePlaywrightCypressVitestJestDetoxMaestroStorybookGitHub ActionsCircleCIDatadogSentryPostHogStripeAuth0SupabaseVercelFly.ioPlanetScale

With QA Roast we cut app crashes in half and the App Store rating moved from 3.6 to 4.5 in a quarter. They found the bugs our automation kept lying about.

Founder

Mobile dating app · 2M+ MAU

★★★★★
What you get

Three ways to work with us, one of them on purpose.

Most teams hire us as an embedded partner. The other two are how that work shows up in code: automation that pulls its weight, and human testing that catches what your automation can't.

01.Embedded QA Partner

A senior QA inside your team for 3–6 months.

Same standups, same release notes, same fires. We are accountable to the bugs your users would have found, not to a ticket-closure metric.

You get the QA function a Series A team needs without hiring full-time. We leave behind a working test pyramid, a release process the team trusts, and a runbook the next QA hire can follow.

  • Weekly 1:1 with your eng lead
  • Living test pyramid + release runbook
  • Bug triage that stops the recurring fires
test_pyramid.json● green
Unit · 412 tests96%
Integration · 86 tests88%
End-to-end · 24 flows79%
Manual · 6 release scenarios100%

34

P0 bugs caught

2

False positives

6m 48s

CI runtime

02.Test Automation

Automation that earns its seat on CI.

We build the parts of your test pyramid that earn their seat: unit, integration, and end-to-end coverage tied to incidents and revenue paths, not to coverage percentages. CI runs that finish before you context-switch.

  • Playwright / Cypress / Vitest / Detox
  • Tied to revenue paths, not coverage %
  • CI green in under 8 minutes
release-checklist.md● 14/14
  • Smoke run on Playwright suite
  • Visual regression vs main
  • Stripe webhook replay (test mode)
  • Auth flow against staging Auth0
  • Mobile build on iPhone 13 / Pixel 7
  • Manual run: payments + onboarding
  • Sentry error budget < 0.5%

Shipped 18:42 UTC · 0 P0 in first 24h

03.Manual QA Execution

The part of testing that is paying attention.

Release-by-release human testing for the parts of the product no automation will ever cover credibly: payments, onboarding, multilingual flows, edge-of-the-app device behavior, anything downstream of an LLM.

  • Same-day write-up of what we found
  • What we tried · what to ship · what to hold
  • Real devices, real accounts, real money
bug-report · #2841● P0

Stripe SetupIntent silently re-charges saved card on locale switch

Repro
4 of 5 attempts on iPhone 12, fr-CA → en-CA
Trigger
Locale toggle mid-checkout fires onMount twice
Impact
~$3.4k of duplicate auths last 30d (Stripe dashboard)
Owner
Payments squad — flagged in #releases

Filed 09:14 · Reproduced on 2 devices · Ticket linked to ENG-1188

Two takes

Most agencies hide their opinions until the contract is signed. Here are ours.

Take I

Manual testing isn’t legacy. It’s the only thing that catches the bugs your users will.

Every team eventually meets the bug that is technically caught by the test suite, in the sense that the test suite returns green and the bug still ships. Manual QA is not a backstop for missing automation. It is the part of testing that is paying attention.

Take II

Humans orchestrate QA. AI connects the dots.

We use AI agents the way a senior engineer uses a junior one: to draft, to triage, to summarize a long PR, to flag the diff that needs an extra eye. We do not let them decide what to ship. The interesting work is the layer above, and that layer is human.

Old way / our way

What is a QA Roast, actually?

Two columns. Read across. The left one is what most teams default to. The right one is the work we are accountable for.

The old way

Hope, heroics, and PDF reports.

  • A full-time QA hire you can’t justify yet
  • Coverage % goes up. P0s keep shipping.
  • A consultant who delivers a 40-slide audit and disappears
  • AI test-gen tools that miss the actual user flow
  • Release night kept alive by the engineer with the most context

The QA Roast way

A senior partner who ships with you.

  • Embedded for 3–6 months, then the work is yours
  • Tests tied to revenue paths and incidents, not coverage %
  • A runbook the next hire can follow on day one
  • AI used the way a senior uses a junior: draft, triage, summarize
  • Release night that no longer requires a single hero
Free / public

Recipes you can read before you email us.

Real artifacts from past engagements, scrubbed and shared. If you want to see how we work before you spend an hour on a call, start here.

Framework14 steps · MD

Release runbook

The exact checklist we ship with embedded clients. Smoke pass, webhook replay, mobile build, error budget gate.

Email me a copy

Framework~$3.4k saved · PDF

P0 bug report · Stripe SetupIntent

A real bug we caught in the wild, written up the way we file them. Repro, trigger, impact, owner.

Email me a copy

Essay9 min · web

Why coverage % is a lie about quality

A 9-minute read. The two takes that drive every engagement, with examples from the last year of releases.

Email me a copy

How an engagement works

From email to engagement, in four predictable steps.

We do not sell trust calls, discovery sessions, or a free proposal that turns into a sales pipeline. Here is the actual path.

  1. 01

    You email us

    A real human reads it, usually Ksenia. We reply within one business day, asking only what we need to scope a call.

  2. 02

    A 30-minute intro call

    No demo, no slides. We listen, ask the awkward questions, and tell you on the call whether we think we can help.

  3. 03

    A scoped audit, two weeks

    A paid two-week audit of your QA setup, release process, and the most painful parts of your product. You get a prioritized recommendations doc and a proposed engagement.

  4. 04

    Engagement begins

    Most teams continue with us as an embedded partner for 3 to 6 months. Some take the audit and run with it themselves. Both are fine.

Quiet wins

What other founders said after the engagement ended.

They scaled our testing framework across a marketplace running in 6 languages and 8 regions.

CTO· Multilingual marketplace

Working with Ksenia gave us a confident setup for release regression testing and automation.

Head of engineering· B2B SaaS
Talk to us

Have a release that scares you?

Tell us what's breaking. We'll tell you on the first call whether we can help, and if we can't, who probably can.

Email hey@qaroast.comRead our takes

Reply within 1 business day · No demo, no slides · Zero pipeline games