How we audit a startup's critical flows in one week

Most teams that come to us already know they need end-to-end tests. What they don’t know is where to start, how many tests they need, or what it should cost. Writing tests before answering those questions is how you end up with a slow suite that covers the settings page and misses checkout.

So we start with a week of audit. Here’s what that week looks like.

Day 1: how your product makes money

We open with a 60-minute call with your CTO or a senior engineer. We don’t start with the test plan. We ask about the business:

• What does a user have to do before they pay you?
• What does a paying user do every week?
• What broke in the last six months, and who noticed first: you or a customer?

By the end of the call we have a rough list of flows. It’s always longer than it should be.

Days 2–3: walk every flow on staging

With test accounts on your staging environment, we walk each flow the way a user would. We look for the things that make a flow risky or expensive to test:

• Doors: signup, login, password reset, invitations. If one fails, nobody gets in.
• Money: checkout, plan changes, refunds, anything that talks to a payment provider.
• More than one user: sharing, roles, approvals, real-time edits. These need two browsers and careful test data.
• Things outside your app: email links, OAuth, third-party APIs. These decide how much setup each test needs.

We never touch production. Everything happens on staging, with accounts you create for us.

Day 4: read the repo and the CI

With read access to your repository and CI, we check what’s already there: existing tests, how the app is built and deployed, how test users could be created, and how long your pipeline takes today. This is where most estimates change. A flow that looked simple can be expensive if there’s no way to seed its data, and a flow that looked hard can be cheap if your API already does the work.

Day 5: rank, estimate, quote

The last day turns everything into three deliverables:

1. A map of your critical flows, ranked by risk. What it costs you if each one fails silently for a day.
2. A per-flow automation estimate. Some flows are worth automating now. Some are cheaper to check by hand before each release. We say which is which.
3. A fixed quote for Implementation. You pick the flows; we give you one price. The US$1,500 of the audit is credited toward it.

Why a week, and why a fixed price

A week is enough to understand a product’s critical paths without turning the audit into a project of its own. And a fixed price on both stages means you know the full cost before we write a single test. If Implementation takes us longer than we estimated, that’s on us.

The audit is useful even if you stop there. The ranked map tells your team where the risk is, and the estimates tell you what it would cost to cover it, whoever ends up writing the tests.