QA automation and release engineering for a United States B2B SaaS platform

The client is a Boston-headquartered B2B software company providing a workflow automation platform to mid-market and enterprise customers in North America. At engagement start the company had approximately USD 68 million in annual recurring revenue following a Series C round, with an engineering organisation of 82 people. Its growth plan required a material increase in release velocity without a corresponding increase in production incidents.

Release velocity had become the binding constraint on the roadmap. The company shipped approximately 3.4 production releases per month against a target of weekly per-team releases. The bottleneck was a manual regression cycle consuming five to seven days before every release. Test automation existed but was not trusted. Coverage sat at roughly 35% and the suite carried a flake rate high enough that engineers re-ran failures rather than investigating them, so genuine failures were sometimes dismissed. A suite that is not trusted is worse than none, because it consumes time while providing false assurance.

Escaped defects were rising with release volume, with six critical and eighteen high-severity escaped defects in the quarter before the engagement, several reaching enterprise customers.

Hiring had failed to solve it. Boston QA automation engineers commanded compensation the company found hard to justify against feature hires, and two QA hires had both transferred into feature teams within months.

The client selected Corpshore Colombia primarily on time zone and talent. Medellín is a recognised technology hub with a strong engineering base, and QA and release engineering are collaboration-intensive functions where the client had concluded from a prior offshore experience that asynchronous handover, rather than skill, was the root cause of failure. Corpshore proposed treating the engagement as capability transfer rather than capacity rental, committing to leave the client with a trusted, documented test suite and a release process its own engineers could operate, with defined knowledge-transfer milestones. Corpshore's proposed lead spent two days with the client's platform team and identified the flake rate rather than coverage as the primary problem, reframing the client's understanding.

Twenty-two engineers in Medellín: two technical leads, six senior, ten mid-level and four junior, spanning QA automation, DevOps and release engineering. The team works 09:00 to 18:00 US Eastern, the same clock as Boston, joining standups live. Stack: TypeScript, Playwright, Jest, GitHub Actions, Terraform, AWS, Datadog. All engineers are dedicated to the account.

Fix flakiness before adding coverage. The first eight weeks addressed suite reliability rather than coverage, on the reasoning that adding tests to an untrusted suite compounds the problem. Flake rate fell from 32% to under 3% before coverage work began. Coverage where risk is. Coverage expansion was prioritised by production incident history and code churn rather than by module, concentrating effort where escaped defects had actually originated.

Progressive delivery infrastructure. Feature flagging and canary release infrastructure decoupled releases from deployments and allowed rollback without a full release cycle, which let frequency rise without a corresponding rise in incident severity.

Documented knowledge transfer. Four defined transfer milestones with documentation and client sign-off ensure the client's own team can operate the pipeline.

Release frequency

Production releases rose from 3.4 per month to 24.6 by month 12, exceeding the weekly-per-team target. The manual regression cycle fell from five to seven days to under four hours. Escaped defects fell across every severity band despite the volume increase, with critical falling from six per quarter to one and high-severity from eighteen to four.

Test coverage rose from 35% to 87% with flake rate held below 3%, and the client's own engineers now extend the suite independently, the stated capability-transfer objective.

The test suite, release pipeline and progressive delivery infrastructure are client-owned and operated jointly. All four knowledgetransfer milestones were completed. The client has extended the engagement to platform reliability engineering, which its VP describes as a choice rather than a dependency.