Real-User QA Execution

QA the product the way a real person meets it: a persona walks a journey through the product's public interfaces, feels the friction, hits the edges, and reports what happened. This is dogfooding, not a scripted test pass — the session is the work, and the living QA docs tree remembers it.

Three non-negotiables hold every session:

1. In persona. Every interaction and every verification goes through a surface a real user can reach — no dev-tools shortcut, no code-reading to decide what should happen, no patching over a stall.
2. Proof, not optimism. A Pass is the expected observable seen, confirmed through an independent read path, surviving a refresh, with evidence captured. Optimistic UI is not confirmation.
3. Write back or it didn't happen. Every session updates the tree — scenario-file verdicts, bug registry, and the dated report carrying the session debrief.

Input

• qa-docs-path (optional): root of the living QA docs tree; defaults to docs/qa/. The tree is this skill's memory and its only output location — never a temp dir. If it doesn't exist, run qa-report first; it owns the tree and its bootstrap.

Steps

Choose the planned smoke/targeted/full scope. Read only the relevant procedure/schema sections and reuse current evidence for unchanged behavior. A small changed journey does not require all tours, edge categories, or a second full walk.

Step 1 — Resolve the tree, scope, and preconditions

• Read, in order: <qa-docs-path>/README.md (entry points, dev-server command, area codes), the in-scope scenarios/ files, related open bugs/, and this cycle's charters. The tree is the memory; running without reading it recreates the duplication this design kills.
• Scope: a branch/PR run covers the journeys its user-visible diff touches plus an adjacent canary when shared behavior could regress — no user-visible change, report that and stop. A release/full run covers the journeys the cycle plan marked in scope.
• Preconditions: the applicable preconditions and existing required checks are satisfied (reuse current evidence; unrelated suites need not finish before a focused probe) and the product is reachable in a production-parity build (real dev server, real auth, no mocks). Not reachable → name the exact gap and stop.
• Done when: scope is fixed and every precondition is met or its gap is surfaced.

Step 2 — Build the matrix and create the report now

• Read references/status-and-reporting.md — it owns the six-value status enum and the report lifecycle.
• Assemble the session matrix from the planned charters: persona × journey × tour × time-box, ordered by risk. A charter missing for an in-scope journey is drafted per ../qa-report/references/session-charters.md before running — never walk unplanned.
• Create <qa-docs-path>/reports/<YYYY-MM-DD>-<scope>.md from the report template (project copy at <qa-docs-path>/templates/report.md, else assets/report-template.md) before the first session, with every matrix row Pending. This on-disk report is the source of truth for resume — update it after every session and every fix, never only at the end.
• Done when: the report exists on disk carrying the full matrix, every row Pending.

Step 3 — Walk each journey in persona

• Read references/session-protocol.md (the enter→act→verify→capture loop and the evidence standard) and references/persona-fidelity.md (the public-interface guardrails and stall-is-a-finding).
• For each charter, in matrix order: adopt the persona (device, network, locale), enter through its real entry point, and walk the journey verb by verb to its true end state — verifying each step against the evidence standard.
• Hunt paper cuts throughout: persona-felt friction no functional check fails; sharp ones become findings.
• A leg only a human can complete (real payment, external email/SMS, real OAuth) is marked Blocked (needs human verify) with exact instructions — never faked.
• Done when: every charter is walked to a recorded verdict, evidence captured at checkpoints and divergences, the debrief written to the report's Session Debriefs section, and the matrix row updated.

Step 4 — Run each tour and edge probe

• Read references/tours.md (the 10-tour catalog and surface-to-tour matrix) and references/edge-cases.md (the non-technical user edge cases).
• Run each charter's single tour against its surface, in persona, inside the box, asking at each action: "would this matter for this tour's theme?"
• Choose distinct edge cases supported by the changed contract and risk; there is no minimum count. Attempted-and-clean is evidence too.
• Done when: every charter's tour is run and its chosen edge cases are attempted and recorded.

Step 5 — Experiential lens pass

• Read references/lenses.md — the six lenses and their severity defaults.
• For a requested usability/full review or an unresolved experience risk, apply the relevant lenses to the affected journey. Reuse observations from the first walk and re-walk only the missing evidence.
• Done when: the applicable experience risks have evidence, or this optional pass is not needed for the targeted scope.

Step 6 — File findings into the registry

• Read ../qa-report/references/bug-registry.md — it owns ids, dedup, and the impact rubric.
• Dedup first: search bugs/ and the affected scenarios' bug_ids. Re-found → append ## Re-found; regressed → reopen with ## Regressed; only a genuinely new symptom mints a new BUG-<YYYYMMDD>-<slug> id.
• File with the user first — impact tier, persona, journey step, reproduction from the persona's entry point, evidence paths — then link the id into the affected scenario files.
• Done when: every finding is deduped, filed, and linked to its rows.

Step 7 — Fix loop (governed)

• Read references/fix-loop.md — the governor, the regression-test-per-fix rule, and Decisions for a Human.
• Judge each fix against the governor before editing: only what passes all its bounds is auto-fixed, and each auto-fix has evidence at its owning suite/probe (add a regression only for an uncovered invariant) and re-walks the impacted journey, plus an adjacent journey when the failure can propagate. Everything else goes to the report's Decisions for a Human with options and a recommendation.
• Done when: every finding is either fixed-and-retested or escalated with a recommendation, and no fix is left half-applied.

Step 8 — Close the round

• Re-read the round-close checklist in references/status-and-reporting.md; map matrix verdicts to tracker enums per ../qa-report/references/state-schema.md.
• Exit gate: satisfy the project's required local pre-push gate once or cite current evidence; record its result concisely. Delivery still requires exact-head PR CI; a green matrix over a red local or remote gate is not ready.
• Done when: zero matrix rows are Pending, scenario-file verdicts and bug statuses are current, every session's debrief is in the report, and the report's Final Status states release readiness with totals by impact tier — backed by fresh evidence from the current build.

Companion skills

• qa-report — plans what this skill runs and owns the tree's schemas (tracker, bug registry, charters, personas, journeys). Results written here feed the next cycle's planning.
• agent-output-audit — owns CI gates, AI test-hygiene scans, task-status reconciliation, and flaky-test triage. A session that uncovers those files the finding and names that gate; it does not pivot mid-session.
• agent-browser — the browser driver for Steps 3-5; its command surface lives in references/session-protocol.md.

Error handling

• Dev server or browser tooling unavailable: mark the browser legs Blocked (needs human verify) with the exact missing prerequisite, and continue with CLI/HTTP journeys still walkable in persona.
• A flow hangs: close the session, record it, retry once from a clean session, then mark it blocked. A stall is a finding to file, never a thing to nudge past (references/persona-fidelity.md).
• Credentials or test data missing: mark those sessions blocked with the exact prerequisite and proceed with the rest.
• Matrix larger than the window: cut by risk (Blocks-Completion candidates first, then Data-Loss, then Trust-Damage), mark the cut rows Skipped with reasoning, and disclose it in Final Status — coverage shrinks visibly or not at all.