22 Apr 2026
From MVP to Production: Code Quality, Testing, and Release Cadence
How engineering teams evolve from shipping fast to shipping reliably: linting, reviews, automated tests, staging, and releases your clients can trust.
Quality gates early
Adopt linters, formatters, and branch protection before the codebase grows. Pull requests should enforce at least one review and passing CI for unit tests on critical paths.
Testing pyramid in the real world
Prioritize unit tests for business logic, contract tests for integrations, and a small suite of end-to-end flows for checkout or signup. Flaky tests get fixed or deleted—never ignored.
Release cadence and rollbacks
Ship on a schedule or on demand with feature flags. Automate database migrations with backups. Document rollback steps so production incidents recover in minutes, not hours.