Launching with zero test coverage. Risky.Critical bugs found today.

PM scopes the critical test coverage in the first hour not writing tests blindly but identifying which flows absolutely cannot break on launch day: authentication, core user journey, checkout or payment if applicable, and any feature highlighted in your launch announcement. In a Starter session (4 hours), the QA engineer writes targeted Playwright end-to-end tests covering the top 5-8 critical paths, configured to run in your existing CI/CD pipeline on every push. These tests catch the most damaging regressions before they reach production. A Full Day session extends coverage to secondary flows and adds API contract tests. In 5 days with two Full Day sessions, you can have comprehensive critical-path coverage.

Yes. PM scopes the test type mix based on your highest-risk failure modes. E2E tests (Playwright or Cypress) cover the 5-8 critical user journeys that must work on launch day these test the full stack and catch the most visible failures. Unit tests (Jest with React Testing Library for frontend, pytest for Python backend) cover business logic functions with the highest complexity validation rules, calculation functions, data transformation logic hard to catch with E2E tests alone. Integration tests cover API endpoints connecting your frontend to backend or third-party services. The test allocation depends on your stack and risk profile PM defines the test plan before the engineer starts writing.

Test priority order based on launch risk: first, user authentication (signup, login, password reset, session management) if this breaks, no user can access the product; second, the primary conversion flow (the sequence of steps a new user takes to complete the core value action); third, payment processing if applicable (the most legally and financially risky failure mode); fourth, email delivery for transactional emails (confirmation, password reset) broken email triggers immediate user support escalation; fifth, data persistence (does the thing a user creates actually save and appear correctly on next login?); sixth, error handling for the top 3 expected failure modes (what does the user see when the API returns an error or they hit a validation constraint?).

For E2E testing, Playwright is the current default: it tests Chromium, Firefox, and WebKit (Safari) in the same run providing cross-browser coverage, has better network interception for testing API-dependent flows, runs faster in CI with parallel execution, and its API is more intuitive for complex interactive flows. Cypress remains good if your team already uses it we do not recommend migrating from a working Cypress setup. For unit and integration tests: Jest is standard for most JavaScript and TypeScript projects and works well with React Testing Library for component tests. Vitest is the better choice for Vite-based projects it runs significantly faster than Jest for that build tool.

No single percentage is universally correct meaningful coverage of critical paths matters more than a high coverage percentage on low-risk code. For a production launch, the minimum safe coverage is: 100% of authentication flows, 100% of payment flows if applicable, 100% of the primary conversion path, and 80% of your public API endpoints. Beyond these minimums, the highest-value additional coverage is unit tests for your validation logic and business rules, and integration tests for third-party API integrations (Stripe, email delivery, authentication providers) that fail silently when the external service behaves unexpectedly. PM defines the specific test plan against these priorities before the engineer starts writing.

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