When the world
paused, I pressed play.
In the spring of 2020, the world went quiet. Offices emptied, releases stalled, and engineering teams found themselves confronting the fragility of their own delivery pipelines.
From a city in lockdown, I saw an opportunity to build something I had always wished existed: a QA practice that treated quality not as a final checkpoint, but as a fundamental part of how software is built and shipped.
That idea became Minus3Labs.
The name comes from an engineering mindset: subtract assumptions, complexity, and risk until only what matters remains. My belief was simple. Quality shouldn't depend on luck, heroic debugging, or a last-minute testing sprint. It should be engineered into the system from the start.
Built from the ground up
I started with a Playwright repository, a terminal, and a conviction that the best way to improve software quality was to work alongside the people building it.
That conviction still shapes how we operate today. Our team embeds directly into client codebases, working shoulder to shoulder with developers to build reliable automation, strengthen release pipelines, and make quality an everyday engineering responsibility.
Six years later, that first commit has grown into two hubs, a dedicated practice for tackling test flakiness, and an advisory model shaped by years of hands-on experience.
As founder, I remain deeply involved in the work. I work alongside our engineers, stay close to the technical decisions, and help turn complex quality challenges into practical, lasting solutions.
We build the systems, tools, and engineering culture that make quality a repeatable outcome.
The founder
"I never set out to build an agency that simply delivers testing services. I wanted to build a team that works alongside engineers to make quality something they can rely on, release after release."
Martin D.
Founder, Minus3Labs
Minus3Labs is deliberately hands-on. I believe the best results come from combining strong engineering leadership with a team that is deeply involved in the details. Every engagement benefits from that approach: experienced guidance, practical execution, and a shared commitment to building software teams can trust.
Because great quality engineering isn't about catching more bugs at the end. It's about helping teams build better software from the start.
Initial commit. Minus3Labs founded
I started alone during a global pause, with one conviction: quality should be built in, not inspected at the end. QA-as-a-service, embedded by default.
First Playwright framework shipped
My reference architecture went live on a production platform. End-to-end coverage, parallelized across browsers, with a maintenance cost teams actually accepted.
CI/CD hardening practice launched
I moved upstream, embedding inside release pipelines. Quality gates, flake quarantine, and deterministic test environments became the signature of my work.
Amsterdam hub established
A second European base, closer to enterprise clients. Two time zones, one on-call cadence, EU business hours covered end to end.
Flaky-test remediation practice
I turned to the hardest signal in QA: tests that lie. Retry entropy instrumented, environment drift isolated, trust in the suite restored.
Cross-browser matrix & visual regression
Coverage went past functional. Pixel-level assertions, component snapshots, and a matrix that catches regressions before a human ever reviews a PR.
Continuous quality engineering advisory
From executing tests to designing the systems that make quality repeatable. I now advise teams on the operating model, not just the test plan.
# the log above is open-ended; the next commit is yours.