QA transformation: Pest migration + AI-assisted E2E

Sanitized excerpt of commercial work on Salutte2 (Alephoo HDE) — an EMR SaaS used across 5 countries. No proprietary code is disclosed.

Context

A large, mature PHP codebase (CodeIgniter 3, jQuery) with a thin, inconsistent test suite. Regressions were caught late, and manual QA was the bottleneck before every release.

What I did

• Migrated the backend test suite to Pest — ~64,000 lines of tests across 600+ files — establishing the team's modern testing practice.
• Designed and built an E2E methodology on Playwright, assisted by an AI agent — a reusable harness (shared helpers, config, pilot-module validation) that generates and maintains end-to-end coverage. ~+48,000 lines, 1,414 files.
• Stood up CI on GitHub Actions (with actionlint) and consolidated error monitoring on Sentry.

Decisions worth defending

• Pest over PHPUnit — faster feedback and a fluent API that lowered the friction of writing tests, which mattered more for adoption than raw parity.
• AI-assisted E2E as a methodology, not a one-off — the agents generate and maintain specs; the team owns the harness. The win is sustained coverage, not a single generated test.

Outcome

Modernized the testing practice of the team and cut manual QA effort per release cycle, accelerating release cadence for a product serving tens of thousands of users.

Evidence (public PR metadata)

• PR #13594 — migration to Pest (~64k lines).
• PR #13782 — feat(e2e): AI agent E2E testing methodology (+48k lines).
• PR #13645 — full E2E + unit migration to Pest.