QA / Quality lead perspective

Lens: Quality enforced by automation — test pyramid, static analysis, CI gates, and production feedback loops. No manual test execution phase.

Phase by phase

Phase	Your job	Key artifacts	Guides & SOPs
Plan	Clarify testability of acceptance criteria	Testable AC in story	SOP-001
Define	Review BDD; contract test strategy	Gherkin + OpenAPI	Spec-driven dev
Build	Review AI-generated test design in PRs	Test quality in review	Automated testing
Verify	Own CI quality gates policy	Gate thresholds by tier	Linters · SOP-005
Release	Confirm staging synthetics green	Smoke evidence	SOP-006
Operate	Monitor-as-QA alerts; escaped defect tracking	Incident → test link	Observability as QA
Learn	Mandate regression tests Sev-1/2	Merged regression PR	SOP-008

What QA does not do in this model

• Manual regression passes or UAT script execution
• Sign-off after running test cases by hand

What QA does do

• Define and tune automated gate policy
• Meta-review test design in PRs
• Track escaped defects and close the loop to CI
• Partner with SRE on monitoring-as-QA patterns

Deep dive: QA & guardrails

Pitfalls (QA view)

Pitfall	Mitigation
Reintroducing manual QA "just in case"	Automate the check instead
AI tests from implementation	Generate from OpenAPI
Weak mutation scores on T1	Tier-based mutation floor
Ignoring prod alerts as "ops only"	Escaped defect process

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