Quality Engineering Consulting

Stop the incidents.
Ship with confidence.

Your team is fighting fires instead of building, and stakeholders want answers you don't have yet. We find what's broken and help you build the engineering practices your team needs to stop reacting and start growing.

Book a Free Call

No obligation. We figure out if it's a fit first.

The Problem

Engineering leaders are bleeding.
Most consultants hand them a bandage.

You are in the middle of a production incident, your best engineers are asleep, and the reputational damage is being charged by the minute. You have to tell that burnt out engineer they need to miss their kid's hockey game to stay and put this fire out.

You've seen the monitoring dashboards showing no errors while users are experiencing failures. In the aftermath, the assessment is always the same. Error logs were missing. Failure modes were never specified. Nobody had written a requirement for how the system should behave when things go wrong. When it's over, you still have to walk into that stakeholder meeting and explain it.

Most teams have a prioritization problem, not a technical problem. That distinction is everything. It is also what most people miss, especially as teams adopt agentic coding tools where the velocity of output accelerates faster than the reliability of the system underneath it.

  • The same incident has happened more than once
  • Your monitoring looks healthy but customers report issues
  • You have a backlog of known issues that never get prioritized
  • New engineers are afraid to touch certain parts of the codebase
  • Your release process depends on one person who knows how it works

This is what an unreliable system looks like from the inside.

How It Works

The process that ends the firefighting.

01
Diagnose
The hard questions others skip get asked, and the places others avoid get examined: a full assessment of your engineering systems, process, culture, and team.
02
Reveal
We put a number on it. Unreliability has a real cost in lost engineering time, incident response, and delayed product work. You will see exactly what the current situation is costing you.
03
Identify
Together, we surface the root causes beneath the symptoms. Not just what broke, but why it keeps breaking.
04
Fix
Whether that is an automation framework, a release process, or testing infrastructure, the fix gets built. The bleeding stops.
05
Target
We define what reliable looks like for your system and start measuring it. Set the next target, so your team knows exactly what good looks like going forward.
Case Studies

From damage control to building with confidence.

ChargeLab
Building a quality engineering function from scratch at a Series A EV charging platform
ChargeLab builds a hardware-agnostic SaaS platform for managing EV charging infrastructure across North America, where a failure does not stay software, it strands a driver mid-charge or faults live electrical equipment. Scaling fast at Series A, the company had outgrown its early engineering practices. Quality ownership was informal, testing was manual, and production incidents were consuming capacity that should have been going toward the product. The quality engineering function was built from the ground up: automated test frameworks, CI/CD pipelines with quality gates and checklists, and developer-owned testing practices across the team. That shift is what took incidents from a weekly fire drill to a rare event.
95%
Reduction in production incidents over 12 months.
Cleanlist
Catching bad data before it reached clients at Canada's largest data provider
Cleanlist is Canada's largest provider of customer data solutions, cleaning, enriching, and validating contact data for hundreds of client brands. Every incoming file had to be mapped by hand into Cleanlist's internal schema, entirely on human judgment with no consistent definition of a correct mapping. At growing volume, mapping errors were inevitable, and the first time anyone found one was usually when a client noticed something wrong with their data. An automated mapping pipeline replaced it: clear-cut cases handled on their own, ambiguous ones flagged for review before they shipped, the same failure-mode-first approach that stops production incidents, applied to a data pipeline instead of a codebase. SOC-2 certification made that non-negotiable.
80%
Reduction in manual mapping effort, with 85% accuracy on automated cases, catching bad data before it reached a client.
Trudell Medical International
Aligning hardware, firmware, and software to catch defects before they shipped
Trudell Medical International designs and manufactures respiratory health devices distributed in over 100 countries. Expanding into software-controlled mechatronic devices, the company ran hardware, firmware, and software engineering as three separate disciplines, each with its own definition of a defect. That gap was where failed prototypes and field incidents slipped through, the same pattern that causes production incidents in software teams, spread across three disciplines instead of one codebase. All three got assessed, the gaps between practice and regulatory compliance closed, then automated testing infrastructure and an incident and defect roadmap followed, so failures got caught at the discipline boundary, not in the field, and not in a patient's hands.
3
Engineering disciplines united under one failure strategy, closing the gaps where defects and field incidents were slipping through.
Cost Calculator

Find out what unreliable software is costing you.

Adjust the numbers below to match your team and watch the total update instantly. Email yourself the full breakdown whenever you're ready.

Every incident below is time your team isn't spending on the roadmap. Adjust the sliders to match what actually happens on your team.

hrs
%
$
Estimated Annual Cost of Unreliability
Updates as you adjust the numbers
$41,375
Engineer time on incidents$25,250
On-call premium$16,125
This is a directional estimate based on what you entered. A full diagnostic goes deeper. Let's fix this →
About

Engineering Leadership

I work where a failure is never just an inconvenience: medical devices, energy infrastructure, and other safety-critical systems, where an incident carries real regulatory, safety, and financial weight. I diagnose what's broken across the system, process, and culture, then build the fix.

I go deep, think across disciplines, and do not leave until it works, so you get an engineering team your business can bet on.

Medical DevicesEV InfrastructureEmbedded SystemsQuality EngineeringRehabilitation RoboticsWearable Safety Devices
Tyler Desplenter
Tyler Desplenter, PhD
PhD, Robotics & Control Systems  
Systems Thinking Understand the parts, and the whole. Process, culture, tooling, and team structure are all in scope. The technical problem is rarely the only problem.
Scientific Foundations Diagnose from evidence, not just instinct. Use methodologies that have been tested, challenged, and validated. Test rigorously and iterate.
Technical Leadership Familiar with the pressure, not just the theory. Build teams, manage incidents, and understand the code. The problems engineering leaders bring are recognized, not described.
Common Questions

Questions worth asking before you book a call.

The first step is a free discovery call, no commitment, just a conversation to understand your situation. From there, you either start with the Engineering Diagnostic if you want it fixed for you, or the Quality Engineering Workshop if you want your team to learn how. The Diagnostic is a structured session, typically around two hours, with a full findings report you can act on.

Results vary by engagement, but I've helped teams go from firefighting every week to entire stretches with zero production incidents. That is not a guarantee for every engagement, but it shows what is possible when the root causes get fixed instead of patched.

Probably, eventually. But the team is the system. When the same people who built the current patterns are also responsible for diagnosing and changing them, there is a structural conflict. An outside perspective sees what insiders have stopped noticing. What you get is a straight read from someone with no reason to hide the truth.

The Engineering Diagnostic is a structured session, typically around two hours, with a full findings report you can act on. The Quality Engineering Workshop runs as a single working session with your team. Anything beyond that gets scoped together based on what actually surfaced, not a fixed timeline set in advance.

Probably closer than you think. Unreliable systems look very different on the surface: EV charging software, medical devices, cloud platforms. But the root causes are almost always the same: failure modes never defined upfront, ownership gaps between teams, reactive patching instead of deliberate design. The domain changes. The patterns do not.

It depends on the engagement, but the principle is consistent: you always know what is happening and why. The Engineering Diagnostic is a focused session followed by a written report. Deeper engagements involve interviews, technical reviews, and direct work with your team. At every stage, you leave knowing more than when you arrived.

Busy usually means the system is already in the state that makes this work most valuable. The instinct to wait until things calm down is reasonable, but unreliable systems do not calm down on their own, they compound. The question is whether the cost of waiting is lower than the cost of starting. The assessment tool above can help you put a number on that.

That is exactly what the cost assessment on this page is designed to answer. If the number it generates is larger than the cost of an engagement, the math is straightforward. If it is not, I will tell you that. Clients should be able to see a clear return.

Articles

Hard truths for engineering leaders.

July 11, 2026 · 5 min read
Changing Engineering Culture Starts With Conversation
It has been three days and still no reply from the QA manager. Your team has been tasked with getting the new quoting feature over the line, but you can't get an answer on how your team should go about testing.
Read article →
June 30, 2026 · 5 min read
You Trained Your Engineers To Stay Silent
“So, does anyone have anything they want to share with the team?” The room stays silent. You let it sit long enough that people start to squirm, but no one jumps in.
Read article →
June 23, 2026 · 5 min read
The Hidden Cost of Feature Flags
Your team is about to roll out the new AI-powered search feature the board has been pushing for. They put it behind a feature flag and selected a subset of users to take it live in production.
Read article →
View all articles →
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tyler@reliably.ca|LinkedIn