Business & product context
How critical is the system you are working on?
We're trying to understand the business and operational impact if this system experiences downtime, performance issues, or failures. This impacts the delivery methodology, risk mitigation and testing approach.
Internal tool (used only inside the company)
Customer-facing application (visible to clients/customers)
Mission-critical system (failure has severe business or safety impact)
What level of risk tolerance applies to your system?
we want to understand how much operational risk (downtime, bugs, performance issues) your organization is willing to accept in exchange for faster delivery, cost savings, or other trade-offs.
Fail-fast acceptable (errors tolerated if learning is quick)
Moderate risk tolerance (some issues acceptable, but limited)
Zero-defect required (no failures tolerated, system must be highly reliable)
Which compliance or regulatory requirements apply?
We want to identify any legal, industry or organizational standards your system must adhere to (such as GDPR, HIPAA, SOX, PCI-DSS, ISO certifications, or internal security policies) that will impact our delivery approach, testing requirements, documentation needs, and deployment processes.
None (no formal compliance required)
Medium (GDPR, ISO, or similar)
Heavy regulation (e.g., FDA, PCI DSS, SOX, medical, finance, safety-critical)
What is your release cadence?
We want to understand how frequently you deploy changes to production (daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, or on-demand) and whether you follow a regular schedule or event-driven releases, which helps us align our delivery approach with your deployment rhythm and planning cycles.
Continuous deployment (multiple releases per day)
Iterative Agile (every sprint, typically 1–4 weeks)
Scheduled Waterfall (quarterly or longer cycles)
How do you handle emergency deployments and hotfixes?
We want to understand your process for addressing critical production issues that require immediate fixes outside of your normal release cadence, which impacts our risk planning and support strategies.
Ad-hoc (no defined process, handled case-by-case)
Expedited (streamlined version of normal process with reduced gates)
Structured emergency process (defined procedures with post-incident review)
Requirements & Design
How would you describe the quality of requirements?
We want to understand how well-defined, complete, and stable your project requirements are (clear and detailed, mostly defined with some gaps, or vague and evolving), which directly impacts our delivery planning, development approach, and risk mitigation strategies.
Vague (unclear, no testable acceptance criteria)
Some criteria defined (partial acceptance/testability)
Fully testable (clear, measurable, test-ready)
What is the level of ownership across roles?
We want to understand how clearly defined and accountable each team member's responsibilities are (clear ownership with defined decision-making authority, shared responsibilities with some overlap, or unclear boundaries with frequent hand-offs), which affects our collaboration approach, escalation paths and delivery coordination.
Siloed Product Owner/BA/FA (requirements come top-down, little QA/Dev input)
QA involved (some collaboration, but still limited ownership)
Collaborative (PO, QA, Devs co-own requirements)
What is the level of design rigor?
We want to understand how thoroughly the system architecture, user experience, and technical design have been planned and documented
None (no structured design, ad-hoc)
Informal (diagrams, discussions, but no traceability)
Formalized (design artifacts with traceability to requirements)
How are non-functional requirements (NFRs) handled?
We want to understand how your team defines, prioritizes, and validates requirements like performance, security, scalability, availability, and usability. Are they ormally documented with specific metrics and testing, informally addressed as needed, or largely undefined.
Absent (not defined)
Partial (some documented, not consistently tested)
Fully defined & tested (performance, security, scalability, etc.)
How are changes to requirements managed during development?
We want to understand your change control process and how requirement modifications are handled mid-project, which affects our scope management and delivery planning.
Uncontrolled (changes accepted without impact assessment)
Basic control (some review process, limited impact analysis)
Formal change management (documented process with stakeholder approval and impact assessment)
How do you gather and incorporate stakeholder feedback?
We want to understand how user and business stakeholder input is collected and integrated into the development process, which influences our validation approach and iteration cycles.
Reactive (feedback only after delivery)
Periodic (scheduled reviews and feedback sessions)
Continuous (ongoing stakeholder involvement and feedback loops)
Development & testing practices
Which SDLC model best describes your team/organisation?
We want to identify your primary software development approach (Agile/Scrum, Waterfall, DevOps/Continuous Delivery, hybrid model, or ad-hoc process), which determines how we structure our delivery methodology, communication cadence, and project milestones to align with your existing workflows.
Waterfall (linear, big-bang delivery)
Agile (iterative, sprint-based)
CI/CD DevOps (continuous integration, deployment, automation)
What is the level of unit test coverage?
We want to understand the extent of automated unit testing in your codebase (high coverage with established standards and enforcement, moderate coverage with some gaps, or low/minimal coverage), which influences our testing strategy, code quality assurance approach and delivery confidence levels.
Absent (<20%)
Medium (20–70%)
Strong (>70%)
How are code reviews handled?
We want to understand your team's approach to reviewing code changes before integration (mandatory peer reviews with defined standards, informal reviews as time permits, or minimal/no systematic review process), which affects our quality gates, collaboration workflows, and knowledge sharing practices.
Skipped (rarely or never performed)
Inconsistent (done ad-hoc, varies per team/person)
Structured + automated (systematic reviews with tooling support)
What is your level of test automation?
We want to understand the extent of automated testing across your delivery pipeline (comprehensive automation covering unit, integration, and end-to-end tests, partial automation with some manual testing, or primarily manual testing processes), which influences our testing strategy, delivery speed and quality assurance approach.
None / manual testing only
Partial automation (selected UI or API cases)
Full pyramid (unit + API + UI + security/performance automated)
How is defect management approached?
We want to understand your process for identifying, tracking, prioritizing, and resolving bugs (formal defect lifecycle with defined SLAs and tooling, informal tracking with basic prioritization, or ad-hoc handling without systematic process), which affects our quality management strategy, issue escalation procedures, and delivery planning.
Reactive (fix after discovery, no systemic prevention)
Mixed (some preventive analysis, some reactive fixes)
Preventive RCA (root cause analysis with prevention measures)
How is technical debt managed?
We want to understand how your team identifies, prioritizes, and addresses technical debt, which impacts long-term maintainability and delivery velocity.
Ignored (technical debt accumulates without formal management)
Ad-hoc (addressed when it blocks development)
Systematic (regularly assessed, prioritized, and planned into development cycles)
What is your approach to security integration in development?
We want to understand how security considerations are built into your development process rather than treated as an afterthought, which affects our security testing strategy and compliance approach.
Post-development (security review only before production)
Checkpoint-based (security reviews at key milestones)
Shift-left security (integrated throughout development cycle)
Tooling & infrastructure
What is the maturity of your CI/CD setup?
We want to understand the sophistication of your continuous integration and deployment pipeline (fully automated with comprehensive testing and deployment stages, partially automated with some manual steps, or minimal automation with largely manual processes), which determines our delivery integration approach, deployment strategy and release management practices.
Absent (manual deployments, no CI/CD)
Partial (basic pipelines, limited automation)
Advanced pipelines with quality gates (automated build, test, deploy)
How are quality gates applied?
We want to understand what checkpoints and criteria must be met before code progresses through your delivery pipeline.
None (no automated checks)
Basic (linting, unit test thresholds)
Advanced (static analysis, security, performance enforced)
What is the state of your environments?
We want to understand the availability, stability, and configuration of your development, testing, staging, and production environments.
Unstable (inconsistent, hard to reproduce issues)
Stable but limited (works for basic testing, lacks realism)
Production-like, on-demand (scalable, mirrors production closely)
What level of observability is in place?
We want to understand your system's monitoring, logging, and tracing capabilities (comprehensive observability with metrics, logs, and distributed tracing across all components, basic monitoring with limited visibility, or minimal instrumentation with reactive troubleshooting).
None (no visibility, hard to debug issues)
Basic logs (manual inspection possible, but limited insight)
Real-time monitoring + feedback loops (metrics, dashboards, alerts)
How strong is traceability across the lifecycle?
We want to understand your ability to track requirements, changes, and defects from conception through production (comprehensive traceability with linked artifacts and audit trails, partial traceability with some gaps in tracking, or limited traceability with manual correlation required), which influences our documentation approach and change management processes.
None (requirements, tests, and code not linked)
Partial (some traceability, but gaps remain)
End-to-end (requirements → design → code → tests → production)
What is the maturity of your test management tooling?
We want to understand the sophistication of your tools for planning, executing, and tracking tests. Is this an integrated test management platform with automated reporting and traceability, basic tooling with manual coordination, or ad-hoc testing without test management.
None (test cases tracked in spreadsheets or ad-hoc tools)
Basic (dedicated tool in place, mostly for manual test case tracking)
Integrated (market-standard tool, integrated with CI/CD, automation, defect mgmt, and reporting)
How do you manage configuration across environments?
We want to understand your approach to maintaining consistent configurations and managing environment-specific settings, which affects deployment reliability and troubleshooting capabilities.
Manual (configurations managed manually, prone to drift)
Templated (some automation, but manual coordination required)
Infrastructure as Code (fully automated, version-controlled configuration management)
How are third-party dependencies managed?
We want to understand your approach to managing external libraries, APIs, and services, including security updates and compatibility, which impacts system stability and security posture.
Unmanaged (dependencies updated reactively or not at all)
Basic tracking (some awareness of dependencies, periodic updates)
Systematic management (automated tracking, vulnerability scanning, planned updates)
How is performance baseline management handled?
We want to understand how you establish, maintain, and monitor performance benchmarks to detect regressions and plan for scaling needs.
None (no performance baselines or benchmarking)
Ad-hoc (occasional performance testing without systematic baselines)
Continuous (automated performance testing with trend analysis and alerting)
Team & Culture
How is ownership of quality distributed?
We want to understand who takes responsibility for ensuring product quality throughout the delivery process - whether quality is handled by a dedicated QA team (Siloed QA), shared between developers and QA teams (Shared with Dev), or collectively owned across all roles including Product Owner, Development, QA, and Operations (Embedded), which determines our collaboration model, testing strategy, and accountability structures.
Siloed QA (QA is solely responsible for quality)
Shared with Dev (developers share responsibility with QA)
Embedded (PO, Dev, QA, Ops all share ownership)
How does collaboration on quality happen?
We want to understand the frequency and depth of cross-team communication around quality concerns - whether teams work in isolation with handoffs and minimal feedback (Throw-over-wall), collaborate at scheduled intervals like sprint reviews and milestones (Periodic sync), or maintain continuous daily interaction across functions
Throw-over-wall (handoffs, minimal feedback loops)
Periodic sync (collaboration at milestones, sprint reviews, etc.)
Daily cross-functional (continuous, day-to-day collaboration)
What best describes the quality mindset in the team?
When we ask "What best describes the quality mindset in the team?", we want to understand how deeply quality considerations are embedded in your team's culture and decision-making - whether quality issues are addressed only after they occur with little proactive focus (No awareness), the team is developing quality practices but application is inconsistent (Transitional), or quality considerations actively drive technical decisions and team behaviors (Quality-first champions.
No awareness (quality is reactive, not prioritized)
Transitional (growing awareness, inconsistent practices)
Quality-first champions (quality drives decisions and behaviors)
How is continuous improvement managed?
We want to understand your team's approach to learning from issues and enhancing processes - whether improvements happen without formal structure or retrospectives (Absent), lessons are captured informally but not systematically acted upon (Ad-hoc), or you follow structured root cause analysis with tracked follow-up actions (Structured RCA-driven), which affects our improvement facilitation approach, metrics tracking, and process evolution strategy.
Absent (no retrospectives, no structured improvements)
Ad-hoc (some lessons learned, but not systematic)
Structured RCA-driven (root cause analysis with follow-up actions)
What is the team's experience level with the current technology stack?
We want to understand the technical proficiency and learning curve considerations for the team, which impacts our knowledge transfer approach, development velocity expectations, and risk mitigation strategies.
Limited (team new to technology, significant learning curve)
Mixed (some experienced members, some learning required)
Expert (team highly proficient with current technology stack)
How is knowledge sharing managed across the team?
We want to understand how information, skills, and institutional knowledge are distributed and preserved within the team, which affects our documentation approach and knowledge transfer planning.
Individual silos (knowledge concentrated in specific people)
Informal sharing (ad-hoc knowledge transfer, limited documentation)
Systematic sharing (regular knowledge sessions, comprehensive documentation, cross-training)
How are capacity constraints and workload managed?
We want to understand how the team handles competing priorities, resource allocation, and workload distribution, which affects our delivery planning and timeline expectations.
Overloaded (team consistently at or over capacity, competing priorities)
Balanced (manageable workload with some flexibility for changes)
Optimized (well-planned capacity with dedicated time for improvement and learning)
How can we reach out?
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