Agentic QA Rollout Playbook (30 Days)

Goal: Stand up an agentic QA pilot that measurably reduces regression risk on 1–2 critical user journeys, while keeping developer trust high.

Week 1 — Define scope and quality contracts
1) Choose 1–2 Golden Journeys
- Pick flows tied to revenue or retention (e.g., signup, checkout, permissions admin).
- Assign a single DRI per journey (name + team).

2) Write the Quality Contract (one page)
- Success metric: e.g., “Checkout success >= 99.5% on staging canary.”
- Performance SLO: e.g., p95 < 400ms for critical endpoints.
- Data/security: “No PII in client logs; secrets never exposed.”
- AI (if applicable): policy violation rate <= 0.1% on red-team suite.

3) Instrument observability
- Ensure traces connect web/app -> API -> DB and include build SHA, flag state, and environment.
- Set up dashboards for: change failure rate, MTTD/MTTR (regressions), and flaky-test rate.

Week 2 — Shadow mode execution
4) Configure CI lanes
- Required lane: deterministic unit/integration/contract checks.
- Advisory lane: agent exploratory + UI checks + AI eval suite.

5) Run shadow mode for 10 business days
- Agents execute on every merge; failures do NOT block releases.
- Every finding must include: repro steps, screenshots, trace link, suspected commit range.

6) Triage rules (reduce noise)
- Deduplicate: group identical failures by stack trace + DOM snapshot hash.
- Severity scoring: S0 (data loss/security), S1 (journey broken), S2 (degradation), S3 (cosmetic).
- Alerting: page only for S0/S1; tickets for S2; log-only for S3.

Week 3 — Establish trust and ownership
7) Measure pilot signal quality
- Actionable rate target: >= 60% of alerts lead to a real fix or rollback.
- Flake target: <= 5% of agent UI failures are “non-reproducible.”

8) Close the loop
- Auto-create Jira/Linear tickets with owner mapping.
- Add a weekly 30-minute quality review: top regressions, root causes, missing contracts.

Week 4 — Enable gating (narrowly)
9) Gate only on high-confidence checks
- Block releases on: contract tests + critical API checks + one deterministic golden-journey path.
- Keep exploratory and AI evals advisory until they hit signal targets for 2 consecutive weeks.

10) Cost and security review
- Confirm secret handling, audit logs, and environment isolation.
- Model run-cost at 10x volume; set budgets and alerts.

Exit Criteria (ready to scale beyond pilot)
- Change failure rate down by >= 20% for the golden journey OR MTTD improved by >= 30%.
- Gated checks maintain < 2% flake rate for 14 days.
- Clear DRI ownership and a documented process for vendor/model updates.

If you hit the criteria: expand to the next 3 journeys by risk tier, not by convenience.