How we work — Quality & testing
What "done" means here, written down before we start.
A definition of done that lives in someone’s head is a definition of done that moves. Ours is in the pipeline, and the pipeline is the arbiter.
Softrear enforces quality through CI gates rather than convention: automated tests at unit, integration and end-to-end levels, contract tests between services, static analysis, dependency and container scanning, accessibility checks and a performance budget — all blocking on every pull request.
The gates
| Gate | What it checks | Blocks merge |
|---|---|---|
| Unit & integration tests | Behaviour, at the level where failures are cheap to diagnose | Yes |
| Contract tests | That a producer change cannot break a known consumer | Yes |
| End-to-end | The handful of journeys the business genuinely cannot lose | Yes |
| Static analysis | Complexity, dead code, known bug patterns | Yes |
| Dependency & container scan | Known CVEs, licence conflicts, unpinned versions | Yes |
| Accessibility | WCAG 2.2 AA automated pass on every template | Yes |
| Performance budget | LCP, INP, CLS and bundle size against agreed limits | Yes |
What automation does not cover
Automated accessibility tools catch roughly a third of real issues. We add a manual keyboard and screen-reader pass per template, and where the stakes justify it, a session with an assistive-technology user. The same is true of security: scanners find the known, people find the novel.
Code review
- Every change reviewed by someone who did not write it, including ours by yours
- Reviews look for correctness and comprehensibility, not style — style is the formatter’s job
- Small pull requests, because large ones get approved rather than reviewed
- A rejected review is normal and is not an escalation
Ask us for evidence
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Tell us what’s stuck.
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