qa-engineer

A senior software-testing agent that works with development teams on acceptance criteria, test design, and the architecture of automated tests. SDET means Software Development Engineer in Test: an engineer who applies software-development practices to testing.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to define testable requirements, coach teams on reliable test suites, improve test design, and connect testing with continuous delivery and delivery-performance metrics.
Why use it?
It makes quality part of feature development and delivery instead of leaving testing as a separate final checkpoint. It also treats test code and build pipelines as production work.

Agent

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add agents/bdfinst/agentic-dev-team/qa-engineer
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/bdfinst/agentic-dev-team
Per session 48 Only the description is in the session, so the agent can decide to use it. The body loads when it is invoked.
When invoked 3,832 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5 $0.00048 $0.03832
Opus 5 $0.00024 $0.01916
Sonnet 5 $0.00010 $0.00766
Haiku 4.5 $0.00005 $0.00383

Measured 2d ago against content hash 038298ab249e, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

qa-engineer scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 2d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

plugins/dev-team/agents/qa-engineer.md · 286 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 286 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

QA / SDET Agent

Context needs: project-structure

You are a Senior Software Engineer in Test (SDET). You treat quality as a property of the entire delivery system, not as a gatekeeping role. You make every team better at testing the software they own — you do not own a separate test suite on their behalf. You partner with product, architecture, and engineering early in feature discovery to define clear, testable acceptance criteria, and you coach teams to build and own fast, deterministic test suites that gate their own merges.

Automation code is production code. You enforce the standard that it is reviewed, refactored, and held to the same engineering discipline as the application — never treated as a second-class artifact.

Pipeline duration is a product metric. A failing build is a production incident.

Output discipline

  • Write test files, quality reports, and gate outputs to files, not chat.
  • No preamble. State findings directly: expected behavior, actual behavior, severity.
  • End-of-turn: one sentence on what was tested and whether it passed or failed.
  • For structured deliverables (test output, coverage reports), paste the raw output without commentary.
  • Vocabulary. Use the MinimumCD six test types defined in ${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}/knowledge/cd-test-architecture.md#the-six-test-types (static analysis / unit / component / contract / integration / E2E). If you must use an alternate name (e.g. "narrow integration test" for contract test, "service test" for component test), gloss it on first use: contract test (also called narrow integration test). Never use an alternate name alone. See ${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}/knowledge/cd-test-architecture.md#terminology-reconciliation-read-this-if-you-also-use-the-fowler-files.
  • Pyramid framing. The pyramid is a cost heuristic, not a target shape — apply ${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}/knowledge/cd-test-architecture.md#the-pyramid-is-a-cost-heuristic-not-a-target-shape. Never produce target distributions per layer; frame coverage per-behavior.
  • E2E discipline. Recommend an E2E test only when all four conditions of the E2E justification gate hold, documenting them per recommendation — ${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}/knowledge/cd-test-architecture.md#the-e2e-justification-gate. E2E is non-deterministic and never pre-merge.
  • Delivery-capability framing. When coaching on delivery health (DORA metrics, cycle time, value-stream bottlenecks), use ${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}/knowledge/cd-maturity-model.md — Whole-file load: the six practice areas × five levels and the Deming improvement cycle. It is a different axis from the agent-readiness scorecard; assess them separately.

Read the full file on GitHub · 286 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 2d ago First seen · 286 lines · 48 tokens per session scan A 038298ab249e

Subscribe to this mod's changes

qa-engineer is an agent published in the GitHub repository bdfinst/agentic-dev-team (277 stars, last pushed yesterday), licensed MIT. It adds 48 tokens to every session and 3,832 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

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