qa-project-context

name	qa-project-context
description	Create and fill .agents/qa-project-context.md with the project's tech stack, test frameworks, CI/CD pipeline, environments, quality goals, risk areas, team structure, and conventions. This is the one file every other QA skill reads first, so they skip redundant discovery and give context-aware advice. Use when: "set up QA context," "configure testing," "initialize project," first use of any QA skill. Not for: bootstrapping a brand-new project's QA end-to-end — use qa-start (which calls this skill as its first step). Related: qa-start, risk-based-testing, test-strategy, qa-metrics, playwright-automation.
license	MIT
metadata	{"author":"kindlmann","version":"2.0","category":"foundation"}

This skill writes the single file every other QA skill reads. Without it, each skill re-asks "what framework? what CI? where do tests live?" from scratch and gives generic advice. It produces `.agents/qa-project-context.md` in the project root, capturing product, tech stack, test stack, CI/CD, environments, quality goals, risk areas, team, and conventions — with no `[bracketed placeholders]` left behind.

Downstream skills consume specific sections: Risk Areas feeds risk-based-testing and test-strategy; Conventions → Selectors feeds playwright-automation and test-reliability; Quality Goals feeds qa-metrics; Tech Stack feeds every automation skill. Fill those sections well and the rest of the library gets sharper for free.

Discovery Questions

First, check whether .agents/qa-project-context.md already exists — if it does, read it and skip every section already filled (no [brackets]). Then scan the repo for config files (see Codebase Detection) and present detected values for confirmation rather than asking blind. Walk the remaining questions section by section, never all at once.

Product

• What is the product called, and what does it do in one sentence?
• What type is it? (SaaS, e-commerce, media, mobile app, API service, internal tool) — changes which flows matter.
• What are the production, staging, and development URLs?
• What are the 5–10 most critical user journeys? ("If this breaks, we get paged at 2am.") This list drives every other skill's coverage priorities.

Tech Stack

• Frontend framework and language? Backend framework, language, and API style (REST, GraphQL, tRPC, gRPC)?
• Database, cache layer, ORM? Hosting, CDN, monitoring?
• Monorepo? If yes, list each app separately (see Monorepo note) — sharding and detection differ.

Test Stack

• E2E tests today? Framework, config location, test directory. Same for unit, API, visual, performance.
• If a framework is detected from config files, populate Test Stack with its name + version + path — don't re-ask.
• Zero test infrastructure? That's a valid answer; record "None selected yet" and note a default (see Core Principle 3).

CI/CD

• Platform? When do tests run (every push, PR only, nightly, manual)? Sharding/parallelism?
• What blocks a deploy, and what artifacts are saved (screenshots, reports, coverage)?

Environments

• How many environments, with URLs? How close is staging to production (infra, data shape, third-party integrations)?
• Mock services or real APIs in development? — environment parity drives test reliability.

Quality Goals

• Coverage targets today? Flake tolerance? Suite-duration budgets? Metrics tracked or wanted?
• No targets yet? Suggest realistic ones by maturity (see Quality Goals section).

Risk Areas

• Which parts cause the most production incidents? Which integrations are flakiest (payment, email, third-party APIs)?
• Where is churn high and coverage low? Score everything with Impact × Likelihood (see Risk Areas section).

Team

• How many QA engineers, and their specializations? Developer-to-QA ratio? Methodology (Scrum, Kanban, Shape Up)?
• When does QA engage (shift-left during spec, or after dev)? — sets the automation ownership model.

Conventions

• Test file naming pattern? Co-located or separate? Branching strategy and PR requirements?
• Selector strategy for E2E? Test-data strategy (factories, fixtures, seeded DB, API-per-test)?

Core Principles

1. One file is the source of truth for the whole library. Every skill reads .agents/qa-project-context.md first. Duplicating its facts into other docs guarantees drift — keep stack, goals, and risks here and let other skills reference them.

2. Capture the real state, not the aspiration. If there are no E2E tests, write "None selected yet," not a wish. Downstream skills route on what's true: a missing framework triggers a setup suggestion; a fake one sends them building on sand.

3. Detect before you ask; recommend a default only when there's nothing to detect. Read package.json and config files first and confirm what you find. Tool recommendations belong to the specialized skills — the one exception is a project with zero test infrastructure, where you note Playwright (E2E) and Vitest (unit) as defaults in the Test Stack and hand off to playwright-automation / unit-testing. This is the single carve-out to the "no recommendations" rule; everywhere else, just record.

4. Risk Areas is the highest-leverage section — never skip it. It is the direct input to risk-based-testing and test-strategy. Push for at least 3–4 entries scored by impact and likelihood even when the user says "everything's fine."

Codebase Detection

Scan for these before asking about the stack. Present detected values for confirmation; when a test config is found, write the framework name into Test Stack rather than re-asking.

File	Indicates
package.json	Node.js project — check dependencies for the framework
next.config.*	Next.js
nuxt.config.*	Nuxt/Vue
angular.json	Angular
astro.config.*	Astro
react-router.config.ts	React Router 7 / Remix
requirements.txt / pyproject.toml	Python project
go.mod	Go project
playwright.config.*	Playwright is set up → populate Test Stack E2E
cypress.config.*	Cypress is set up → populate Test Stack E2E
vitest.config.* / jest.config.*	Unit test framework → populate Test Stack Unit
.github/workflows/	GitHub Actions CI
.gitlab-ci.yml	GitLab CI
Jenkinsfile	Jenkins
docker-compose.*	Docker-based environments
wrangler.*	Cloudflare Workers
vercel.json	Vercel hosting
bun.lock / bun.lockb	Bun runtime
pnpm-workspace.yaml / turbo.json / nx.json	Monorepo — handle per the Monorepo note
src-tauri/tauri.conf.json	Tauri desktop app
.claude/	Project uses Claude Code skills/agents
.claude-plugin/plugin.json	Project ships a Claude Code plugin
AGENTS.md	Codex / multi-agent workflow conventions

Workflow: Creating the Context File

1. Check for existing context. Look for .agents/qa-project-context.md in the project root.
2. If absent: create .agents/ if needed, scaffold the section structure, run the Discovery Questions starting with Product, and write the file once filled.
3. If present with placeholders: read it, list which sections are complete vs. unfilled, ask only about the unfilled sections, then update — preserve completed sections untouched.
4. If present and complete: summarize the current context, ask what changed (new tools, team changes, shifted goals), and update only the deltas.
5. After completion: confirm the file path, run Verification (below), and suggest the next skill from the context (no E2E → playwright-automation; no strategy → test-strategy; no unit tests → unit-testing).

For two full filled-in files (SaaS and a multi-site publisher) plus the monorepo layout, see references/examples.md. One short illustrative snippet:

## Test Stack
### E2E / Integration
- **Framework:** Playwright 1.60
- **Config Location:** playwright.config.ts
- **Test Directory:** tests/e2e/
### Unit / Component
- **Framework:** None selected yet — Vitest recommended (see unit-testing)

Section Guidance

What makes a good entry in each section. The blank template ships at .agents/qa-project-context.md in the qaskills repo.

Product. Key user flows must be specific and testable: "Buyer searches products, adds to cart, checks out with Stripe, receives confirmation email" — not "user uses the app." This list is what every test skill uses to prioritize. Aim for 5–10.

Tech Stack. Record frontend, backend, database, hosting separately. Pin versions only when they change the testing approach (App Router vs. Pages Router differ materially). Don't copy a version just because an example shows one — read it from package.json.

Test Stack. For each tool: framework name + version, config location, test directory. No infrastructure yet is valid — write "None selected yet" and the recommended default (Principle 3).

Monorepo. List each frontend app as its own Tech Stack and Test Stack entry; keep the shared API/backend as one entry. Shard E2E per app (a change in apps/admin shouldn't run apps/storefront E2E), and note in CI/CD which path filters gate which app's suite. Detection hint: turbo.json / pnpm-workspace.yaml / nx.json. See references/examples.md.

CI/CD. Answer what other skills need: what blocks a deploy, how fast feedback is, what evidence is preserved.

Environments. Note how staging diverges from production — a different DB engine in staging means staging-green tests can still fail in prod.

Quality Goals. Concrete and measurable only. Pick starting targets by maturity:

Maturity	Unit coverage	E2E	Flakiness	Suite duration
Early-stage startup	60% on business logic	Top 5 critical flows	<2%	Unit <3 min, E2E <15 min
Growth-stage	80%	All critical paths	<2%	Unit <3 min, E2E <15 min
Enterprise	90%+	Comprehensive + perf budgets	<1%	Unit <3 min, E2E <15 min

Write them as numbers: "80% line coverage measured by Istanbul," "flake rate <2% over a rolling 30-day window," "full E2E under 15 min with 4 shards." Never "we want great quality."

Risk Areas. Use the table — columns Area, Risk Level, Business Impact, Notes — and score with Impact × Likelihood:

• Critical (test first): high impact + high likelihood (payment flow with known edge cases).
• Important: high impact + low likelihood (auth — catastrophic if broken, rarely changes).
• Monitor: low impact + high likelihood (notification formatting — breaks often, low severity).
• Backlog: low impact + low likelihood (admin settings — stable, rarely used).

At least 3 entries, never vague ("everything breaks").

Team. Record actual headcount and the dev:QA ratio — it sets the automation ownership model:

Dev:QA ratio	Ownership model
Solo / zero QA (effectively infinite)	Devs own all tests. No manual regression suite; lean on low-barrier automation (Playwright + Vitest) and CI gates. QA "role" = strategy + critical-path E2E, done by the dev.
High (8:1+)	Developers write tests; QA focuses on strategy, critical-path automation, exploratory testing.
Balanced (4:1)	QA owns E2E, devs own unit, integration shared.
QA-heavy (<3:1)	Dedicated automation engineers, comprehensive regression suites, scheduled exploratory cadence.

Conventions. Selector strategy especially — playwright-automation and test-reliability read it to generate matching selectors. Default to data-testid for stability (data-testid="invoice-create-button", kebab-case). If the team prefers semantic/ARIA selectors for accessibility-aware testing, record concrete tokens — role="button", role="heading", getByRole('link', { name: ... }) — and the tradeoff: ARIA roles double as a11y assertions and survive markup churn, but are less stable than data-testid when copy or roles change, so pin a name/level to keep them unambiguous.

Anti-Patterns

1. Asking all questions at once

Dumping 30 questions is overwhelming and gets shallow answers. Walk section by section, Product first.

2. Leaving [brackets] in the final file

If the user has no answer, record the actual state ("None — no E2E framework selected yet"), not a placeholder. Placeholders left in the file silently break every downstream skill that parses it.

3. Inventing information

Detect the stack from package.json, requirements.txt, or config files — then confirm with the user before writing. Don't guess a database or hosting provider.

4. Skipping Risk Areas

The single most valuable section for downstream skills. Push for at least 3–4 scored entries even when the user insists everything is fine.

5. Recommending tools beyond the zero-infra default

This skill records current state; tool selection belongs to playwright-automation, unit-testing, and the other specialized skills. The only recommendation you make here is the Playwright + Vitest default when there is no test infrastructure at all (Principle 3).

Verification

Prove the produced file is complete, smallest check first. From the project root:

test -f .agents/qa-project-context.md \
  && ! grep -q '\[.*\]' .agents/qa-project-context.md \
  && echo "context complete: file exists, no placeholders"

Exit 0 with the message means the file exists and every [bracketed placeholder] is gone. A non-zero exit means either the file is missing or placeholders remain — fix those before handing off to any other skill. Then eyeball that all nine section headers are present:

grep -c '^## ' .agents/qa-project-context.md   # expect >= 9

Done When

• .agents/qa-project-context.md exists in the project root and grep -q '\[.*\]' returns non-zero (no bracketed placeholders remain).
• All nine sections are present: Product, Tech Stack, Test Stack, CI/CD, Environments, Quality Goals, Risk Areas, Team, Conventions.
• Product lists at least 5 specific, testable key user flows (no "user uses the app").
• Test Stack names the actual frameworks + versions + paths in use, or states "None selected yet" with the recommended default noted.
• Risk Areas table has at least 3 entries scored by impact and business impact.
• Quality Goals are concrete numbers (coverage %, flake %, durations) — not aspirational prose.
• Team section shows actual headcount and the dev:QA ratio (or "solo").

Related Skills

• qa-start — bootstraps QA on a brand-new project end-to-end and calls this skill as its first step. Use qa-start when no QA exists yet; use this skill directly to (re)fill context.
• risk-based-testing — turns the Risk Areas section into a prioritized risk matrix. Run it after this skill when the question is "where do we focus testing?"
• test-strategy — consumes Risk Areas, Quality Goals, and Team to set multi-quarter direction.
• qa-metrics — tracks the Quality Goals defined here; both reference the same targets.
• playwright-automation / unit-testing — set up E2E / unit frameworks after the Test Stack section is filled; they read Conventions for selector and naming strategy.
• ci-cd-integration — wires the pipeline described in the CI/CD section.

Reference Files (in references/)

• examples.md — two complete filled-in context files (SaaS and a multi-site publisher) plus the monorepo Tech/Test Stack layout.