When is "Good Enough" Actually Good Enough?

This article is a practical guide to defining “good enough” in a world of constant tech change.

It features clear ways to:

• Link QA effort to business impact
• Decide who should test what
• Make defensible go / no-go decisions without over-engineering or last-minute madness.

If you’re responsible for getting software out of the door, your days can be tense.

You’re expected to release faster, on tighter budgets, with more complex systems, and when something goes wrong, it’s usually your name that gets mentioned first even if the root cause was decided weeks earlier.

In the middle of all this sits a seemingly simple question: When is “good enough” actually good enough?

This is a practical guide for people sitting at the gate between “ready to go” and “absolutely not”...

What Do We Really Mean by QA in 2026?

Contemporary QA is about managing risk at the interface between code and customer and business performance. It’s deciding:

• What needs to be tested
• How thoroughly it needs to be tested
• Who is accountable for saying “go” or “no go”
• What level of risk the organisation is consciously accepting.

And, critically, whether that risk has been surfaced early enough for anyone to do something about it.

There are several forces shaping QA today:

• Speed of release
• Resource constraints
• Complex technology stacks
• Business tolerance for risk.

In this context, the question is no longer, “Did we test everything?” but, “Have we tested sufficiently and properly for what this specific change means for the business?”

Purpose First: How QA Connects to Business Objectives

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To answer “good enough?” you have to start with purpose. A useful way to think about work is to separate it into two broad categories:

Housekeeping

Fixes, small improvements, performance tweaks and refactors. Work that keeps existing experiences running smoothly – improving search relevance, stabilising order feeds, fixing edge cases in returns, or reducing tech debt that quietly accumulates over time.

Net new or strategic change

New features, journeys or capabilities that ladder directly up to board-level objectives. Things like new checkout models, major promotions, loyalty launches, or replatforming critical customer journeys.

A pragmatic rule of thumb:

The more a piece of work is tied to strategic, visible business outcomes, the more deliberate and rigorous its QA process should be.

Roles and Accountability: Who Owns “Good Enough”?

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In many organisations, ownership of “good enough” is unclear. Product, engineering and QA all have stakes in the decision, but nobody is clearly the final gatekeeper. Which usually means decisions get deferred until the last possible moment, often just before a campaign or trading deadline.

A more robust model makes roles explicit.

Product leadership own outcomes such as customer value, conversion, revenue, engagement and strategic fit. They prioritise what gets worked on and when.

Delivery and QA leadership own the definition of “good enough” from a quality and risk perspective. They decide how much testing is appropriate for each type of work, what the acceptance criteria are, and act as the go / no-go gate.

Engineering teams own the quality of the code they write. They participate in testing through unit tests, integration tests and sometimes functional checks, working with QA to ensure issues are understood and addressed.

Common failure modes include:

• Everyone assuming someone else has done the thorough testing
• Product pushing for dates without understanding quality trade-offs
• QA being brought in at the very end, with no input into scope or risk.

In 2026, mature teams are clear: who decides that something is good enough, on what basis, and for which kinds of work. That clarity alone removes a lot of friction.

Who Tests: Resourcing, Team Models and When to Use Independent QA

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Even with clear priorities, you still have to decide who actually tests each change. Most retail organisations now work with a mix of:

• Internal development teams
• System integrators or agencies
• Specialist QA partners.

The key is to choose deliberately, based on risk, visibility and team structure rather than based on habit or convenience.

Blended Teams: Internal and SI / Agency

With blended teams, responsibility for quality can easily become blurred. Different parties may assume someone else is covering certain risks, and vendors may be incentivised to ship fast and fix later – particularly when delivery milestones are contractually driven or split across ecommerce, integrations and downstream systems.

To avoid this, be explicit:

• Who designs the test strategy for this change?
• Who runs unit, integration, end-to-end and regression tests?
• Who owns the final go / no-go call, especially for customer-visible journeys?

For low-risk housekeeping work, it’s often acceptable for the build team, internal or SI, to test and release, with a focused set of regression checks.

For strategic, customer-visible or revenue-critical changes, relying on the same blended team to test its own work is riskier. This is where an independent QA, like us, adds value. We:

• Act as a neutral testing gate for higher-risk changes
• Reduce finger-pointing and increase confidence in sign-off.

In a simple 1–4 gradient model, work rated 3–4 is a strong candidate for independent QA.

Mainly Internal Teams: Housekeeping vs Net New

Where most development is in-house, teams often have deep knowledge of the codebase – knowing where integrations fail at peak, which feeds are brittle, or which promotions have historically caused issues.

This is ideal for housekeeping work:

• Bug fixes, small improvements and tech-debt reduction
• Low-risk internal tools and admin functions.

Self-testing and self-release can be efficient, provided clear acceptance criteria and standard regression checks exist for critical retail areas like checkout, payments, authentication and search.

For net new, strategic features, adding independent QA makes sense when:

• You need a fresh view on brand-new customer journeys
• You want tests designed around end-to-end retail flows and business outcomes
• You need an independent view on what “good enough” really looks like.

A simple rule:

• Internal teams can often self-test levels 1–2
• Levels 3–4 benefit from an independent QA layer

Mainly External Providers: Avoiding “They Test Their Own Work”

Where external providers both build and test, there’s an inherent conflict: the same supplier is paid to create the change and then to fix it if something goes wrong.

For mission-critical retail systems – revenue-driving journeys, compliance-sensitive flows, or peak-trading releases – relying solely on vendor self-testing is a significant risk.

An independent QA, like Spike, helps by:

• Acting as a quality gate alongside the build partner
• Validating behaviour from a customer and business perspective
• Giving leadership a neutral view of whether something is genuinely ready to go live.

You don’t need independent QA for every minor change. But for major new journeys, platform changes, replatforming, or high-stakes campaigns, it turns quality from a promise into something defensible.

Final thoughts: QA as a Strategic Lever, Not a Last-Minute Gate

QA in 2026 is not just a safety net at the end of the process. It is a strategic lever for how organisations manage risk while moving at the speed the retail market demands – especially during peak trading and high-profile campaigns.

For delivery leaders, it’s one of the few levers you can actively shape.

The shift is from:

• “Did we test everything?”
• To “Did we test enough of the right things for what this change means?”

If this article resonates with your world, we’d suggest you use it as a conversation starter – with product, engineering and leadership – to align on where QA adds the most value, and where independent assurance makes sense.