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An audit of your engineering delivery

Who this is for

You're a CTO, VP Engineering, or board member. You're paying a consultancy to deliver software. You want to know if you're getting what you're paying for, and you want the answer in writing from someone who isn't selling you the next phase.

You are not buying a transformation programme or a roadmap. You are buying one report.

Why vendor-blind

We have worked for, beside, and on the aftermath of well known consultancies in the past. To keep the audit bias-free, we require you to withhold their names for the duration of the engagement.

You know who they are. We don't need to.

What you get

They said "CI/CD." They said "Agile." They said "AI." These are already tells. The audit looks past the words at the artefacts.

One written report. Specific findings, with evidence, against named practices:

Each finding cites the artefact it came from. No vibes, no maturity scores, no five-point scales where everyone lands at three.

What we look at

Real software delivery. Code that is shipping or supposed to be. Pipelines that exist or are claimed to exist. The engagement must be a delivery engagement, work that produces software in production. Not coaching, training, advisory, or strategy.

We work against the practices that distinguish teams that ship from teams that perform shipping. Trunk-based development, continuous integration in the true sense, continuous delivery, automated testing at the right points, deployment and release strategy.

What we don't do

What we need from you

Read access to your repositories, your build and deploy pipelines, your project management tooling, your incident records, and your deploy logs for the period under review.

Access on day one means the engagement finishes faster. Access in week two means the engagement starts in week two.

Names of the consultancies involved redacted from the artefacts we see. A short checklist covers what to redact and how.

We do not need executive briefings, leadership offsites, or curated demos.

Helpful, not required:

Conversation with three to six engineers, chosen by us, not by the consultancy under audit. Up to one hour each.

Up to one hour with the engineering leader who commissioned the original work.

Two weeks, fixed price

The price is for the report, not for our time. Two weeks is the ceiling from the day access to the required artefacts is granted. Access delays extend the calendar, not the scope.

AUD 40,000 ex GST (approx GBP 21,000 / USD 26,000), fixed.

Travel at cost, billed without markup. Remote by default.

Get in touch

hello@mainline.systems

Tell us the engagement scope, the codebase, the time window under review. Don't tell us the consultancy's name.