What is actually going wrong? Pick everything that sounds familiar. This drives which categories we look at.
Releases keep breaking things nobody noticed Features that worked last week stop working and you find out from a customer. We have little or no automated testing yet Everything is verified by hand before release, and it does not scale. Our tests are flaky and nobody trusts them Red builds get re-run rather than investigated. We don't know if it works on other browsers or devices Safari, older Android, one specific tablet a customer keeps mentioning. We ship a mobile app and test it by hand Every release means someone tapping through the app on two phones. We don't know how much traffic we can take No idea where it breaks, or whether last week's deploy made it slower. Customers tell us about outages before our monitoring does Expired certificates, a broken checkout, a third party quietly failing. We can't reproduce the bugs users report Reports arrive without steps, environment or any technical context. Users drop off and we don't know why The funnel numbers are clear; the reason behind them is not. We want to validate designs before we build them Decisions are settled by opinion in meetings rather than evidence. We want to ship safely and measure the impact Roll out gradually, roll back instantly, and know whether it helped. We have accessibility obligations to meet WCAG, the European Accessibility Act, or a procurement questionnaire. Security and compliance are asking questions Vulnerable dependencies, leaked secrets, and no evidence of scanning. The codebase is drifting and reviews miss things Inconsistent quality, growing complexity, no enforced standard. We can't show what was tested, by whom, when An auditor, a customer or a regulator wants proof. Test data and environments are a mess Shared staging, stale fixtures, and third-party sandboxes that go down.