QA Engineer Roadmap

What SQA is, how QA, QC and testing differ, the seven testing principles and what a QA engineer does all day.

Where testing fits in Waterfall, Agile and Scrum, the six STLC phases, entry and exit criteria, and shift-left testing.

Unit, integration, system and acceptance testing, functional vs non-functional testing, and the test pyramid.

How HTTP requests and responses work, how TLS secures HTTPS, and what HTTP/2 and HTTP/3 (QUIC) improve.

What manual testing is, when it beats automation, and how to write clear test scenarios and test cases.

Equivalence partitioning, boundary value analysis, decision tables and state transition testing with worked examples.

Charters, time-boxed sessions, test heuristics and note-taking for finding the bugs scripted tests miss.

Writing bug reports developers can act on, severity vs priority, and every state in the defect life cycle.

The difference between smoke, sanity and regression testing, building a regression suite and testing a release.

SELECT, WHERE, comparison and logical operators, LIKE, IN, BETWEEN, ORDER BY, and LIMIT.

The 2xx-5xx status code families, the codes that matter most, and key HTTP headers.

Sending your first API requests, organising collections, and using environments for dev, staging and production.

pm.test and pm.expect assertions on status codes, headers, bodies and response times, plus pre-request scripts.

Variable scopes, saving a login token for later requests, and chaining create → read → update → delete flows.

Validating responses against a JSON Schema in Postman so a changed API contract fails a test immediately.

What to automate (and what not to), the test automation pyramid, choosing a tool and calculating automation ROI.

What JavaScript is, where it runs (browser and Node.js), and how the language has evolved since ES2015.

Your first Selenium test in Python — locators, actions, explicit waits and assertions against a real login form.

Structuring UI tests with page objects so a changed selector is a one-line fix, with a full pytest example.

Installing Playwright Test, running your first cross-browser test, and recording tests with codegen.

Role-based locators, web-first assertions and why Playwright tests rarely need manual waits.

Installing Cypress, the Test Runner, and writing your first end-to-end test against a real page.

Testing REST APIs with the request fixture and mocking backend responses with page.route.

Creating branches, fast-forward vs merge commits, and resolving a merge conflict.

Running one test against many inputs with pytest parametrize, and writing Gherkin scenarios with pytest-bdd.

Running automated tests in GitHub Actions, headless browsers, reports, and finding and fixing flaky tests.

The Collection Runner with CSV data files, and running collections from the command line and CI with Newman.

Defect density, leakage, test coverage, pass rate, MTTR and how to write a test summary report people read.

Where AI genuinely helps QA teams today, where it does not, and how to use it without losing test quality.

Prompts that turn requirements into test cases and test data, and the review checklist that keeps them correct.

Testing non-deterministic AI features — golden datasets, property assertions, LLM-as-judge and safety tests.

Manual testing interview questions — test cases, design techniques, bugs and real scenarios — with answers.