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Briefs and essays.From people who ship.

Long-form writing on architecture, AI, testing, and the engineering decisions behind real programs. Cited, specific, and written for the person who has to defend the choice.

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Industry ReportUpdated Jun 2026

The State of E-Commerce, Mid-2026

A mid-2026 industry report on where e-commerce actually stands: the real cost of replatforming, why look and feel still sells but no longer closes, and what the agentic shopping surge means for merchants. AI-referred retail traffic grew 393% year over year in Q1 and now converts 42% better than other channels. The highest-ROI investment in retail right now is not a new storefront. It is making the storefront you have legible to machines.

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Operating ModelUpdated Apr 2026

The AI Agent Maturity Model

Five levels, seven capability axes, and the four numbers your CFO will ask. The honest picture of what it takes to run AI agents in production, and how most teams overrate themselves by 1.5 levels.

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WhitepaperUpdated Apr 2026

Starting AI Adoption: A Sequence for Mid-Market Engineering Teams

The order of operations we use with mid-market engineering teams that have been told to ship AI and do not know where to start. Six stages, named exit criteria, the anti-patterns that predict failure, and the first-90-days view that ties architecture, evaluation, and model economics into a coherent adoption sequence.

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WhitepaperUpdated Apr 2026

Evaluation Before Shipping: How to Test an AI Application Before It Hits Production

The release-gate playbook for AI features. Covers the five evaluation dimensions, how to build a lean golden set, where LLM-as-judge is trustworthy and where it lies, rollout mechanics with named exit criteria, and the regression suite that keeps a shipped AI feature from quietly rotting in production.

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WhitepaperUpdated Apr 2026

Choosing the Right Model (and Knowing When to Switch)

A practical framework for matching LLM model tier to task. Covers the four axes (capability, latency, cost, reliability), cascade routing patterns that cut cost 60 to 80 percent without measurable quality loss, switching costs you did not plan for, and the worked economics at 10K, 100K, and 1M decisions per day.

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WhitepaperUpdated Apr 2026

Workflow or Agent? A Decision Framework Before You Architect Anything

Most production 'agents' are workflows that overshot. This paper distinguishes deterministic LLM pipelines from autonomous agents, names the four questions that decide which one to build, and covers the failure modes specific to each path. Includes the 'earned autonomy' principle for promoting workflows to agents only after instrumentation justifies it.

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WhitepaperUpdated Apr 2026

Critical Testing Processes: A Non-Prescriptive Framework for Test Process Improvement

CTP is a lightweight, business-driven framework for improving a test function, twelve critical testing processes, no staged maturity model, and assessments that produce prioritized recommendations based on organizational pain and business value rather than an arbitrary rating scale. This is the canonical framework behind the QA Library and much of our consulting practice.

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WhitepaperUpdated Apr 2026

Metrics for Software Testing, Part 1: The Why and How of Metrics

The framework that anchors a test-metrics program, why you need metrics at all, how to derive them top-down from testing objectives, and the four tests (simple, effective, efficient, elegant) every good metric has to pass. Part 1 of a four-part series.

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WhitepaperUpdated Apr 2026

Metrics for Software Testing, Part 4: Product Metrics

Product metrics measure the thing you're actually about to ship, requirements coverage per area, residual quality risk at a glance, and the risk-category table that keeps a release decision honest. The most often-forgotten category of test metric, and the one that prevents bad release decisions. Part 4 of a four-part series.

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WhitepaperUpdated Apr 2026

Quality Risk Analysis: Five Techniques, Seven Lifecycle Benefits, One Process

A practitioner's guide to quality risk analysis, five techniques (informal, ISO/IEC 25010, cost of exposure, FMEA, hazard analysis), a seven-step process for running the analysis, five-point scales for likelihood and impact, and seven ways a good risk analysis keeps paying dividends across the entire project.

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WhitepaperUpdated Apr 2026

Seven Steps to Reducing Software Security Risk

A seven-step program for systematically reducing security risk in an existing codebase (assess, test, analyze, evaluate, repair carefully, examine, institutionalize) updated for the modern landscape of SAST/DAST/IAST, SBOM and supply-chain scanning, DevSecOps, LLM application security, and the current OWASP Top 10.

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Architecture BriefUpdated Feb 2026

Building Production AI Agents for Lead Intelligence

How we architect multi-layer AI agent pipelines that verify every claim, handle failures gracefully, and produce sales intelligence teams actually trust.

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