Technical due diligence
The deal is priced on a demo and the seller's word for the code.
The report says whether the delivery practices are real: continuous integration, continuous delivery, a sound test strategy. Or whether the demo and talk is all there is.
Fixed, ex GST
Vendor-blind audit
You engaged a consultancy. Months in, the status reports are green and ceremonies are happening. Nothing is actually shipping except for PowerPoint presentations.
Find out what your consultancy actually delivers.
I read the code, the pipelines, and the deployment logs. Findings against named practices, citing the artefacts. You withhold the consultancy's name for the duration.
They said "CI/CD". They said Agile. They said AI. Those are already tells.
A consultancy that takes six weeks to produce a deployment log has already given you a finding.
Fixed, ex GST
Expert evidence
A software delivery has failed and the failure is in dispute.
An expert's paramount duty is to the Court, overriding any duty to the party that retains or pays them. Reports comply with the Harmonised Expert Witness Code of Conduct and the Federal Court's practice note GPN-EXPT.
I assess the engineering approach against professional standards: integration, testing, delivery, incident response. Each finding is evidenced from the record. Questions of law, damages, and intent are for others.
No fee is contingent on the outcome
Contact hello@mainline.systems
What about AI?
AI gets nobody off the hook. Code arrives faster and in greater volume, and every line still has to integrate, test, deploy, and survive production. A vendor claiming AI productivity should have a pipeline that proves it. That's auditable.
Who does the work
Nat Young. Former Lead Consultant at Thoughtworks. Fifteen years in delivery, auditing outsourced teams and leading critical launches. Practising what most teams only claim: continuous delivery, test-driven development, trunk-based development. Lowercase-a agile. Based in New South Wales, Australia.