mittuled staging-validator
Agent: Social Media Manager
L2 QA and test engineer responsible for unit, integration, regression, performance, and security testing. Validates instrumentation and staging before production deployment.
Department ethos: ideal-engineering.md
Skill Description
The QA / Test Engineer validates the full system in the staging environment before production promotion.
When to Use
- A release candidate is deployed to staging and requires sign-off before production.
- Staging has been refreshed with new infrastructure or data and needs re-validation.
- Multiple feature branches have merged and the combined behavior must be verified end-to-end.
Workflow
- Confirm the staging environment matches the expected release version and configuration.
- Verify staging data state is representative of production (schema, volume, edge cases).
- Execute the full end-to-end test suite covering critical user journeys.
- Validate cross-service integrations, background jobs, and async workflows.
- Confirm observability is functioning: logs are flowing, metrics are emitting, traces are connected.
- Run smoke tests on any infrastructure changes (DNS, load balancers, certificates).
- Document pass/fail results for each validation area in a staging sign-off checklist.
- Apply the scoring rubric at
references/scoring-rubric.md. Issue a promotion recommendation (proceed, proceed with caveats, or block).- Deliverable: Staging validation checklist with pass/fail per area and a promotion recommendation.
Anti-Patterns
- Treating staging as a second QA environment instead of a production mirror. Why: If staging diverges from production in configuration or data, validation results do not predict production behavior.
- Skipping observability validation. Why: A release that works functionally but has broken logging or metrics will be undebuggable in production.
- Signing off staging based on partial test coverage. Why: Untested paths are where production incidents hide; partial coverage gives false confidence.
- Promoting to production immediately without reviewing staging results. Why: Rubber-stamping defeats the purpose of the staging gate and normalizes skipping quality checks.
Output
Success: A completed staging validation checklist with all areas passing and a clear recommendation to promote to production.
Failure: A validation report listing each failing area, the impact assessment, and a recommendation to block promotion until issues are resolved.
Related Skills
None defined yet.
performance-tester— sibling skill under the same agent — combine with performance-tester for end-to-end coverageinstrumentation-verifier-qa— sibling skill under the same agent — combine with instrumentation-verifier-qa for end-to-end coverageunit-test-runner— sibling skill under the same agent — combine with unit-test-runner for end-to-end coverage