QA & Software Testing Roadmap

From manual test design to automation in CI — the skills QA teams actually hire for.

10 milestones · ~102 hours total

1. 1

   Testing fundamentals

   ~8h

   SDLC/STLC, test levels and types, and verification vs validation.

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2. 2

   Test design techniques

   ~10h

   Equivalence partitioning, boundary value analysis, decision tables and state transitions.

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3. 3

   Test cases and bug reports

   ~8h

   Write clear, repeatable cases; report bugs with steps, evidence, severity and priority.

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4. 4

   Unit testing and TDD

   ~12h

   Write unit tests with a framework, use mocks, and practise red-green-refactor.

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5. 5

   API testing

   ~10h

   Test REST APIs with Postman or code: status codes, schemas, auth and error cases.

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6. 6

   UI automation

   ~20h

   Selenium or Playwright: locators, waits, page objects and avoiding flaky tests.

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7. 7

   Continuous testing in CI

   ~8h

   Run suites on every commit, read reports, and manage test data.

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8. 8

   Performance and load testing

   ~10h

   Response time, throughput and bottlenecks with a tool like JMeter or k6.

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9. 9

   Test strategy and the test pyramid

   ~8h

   Decide what to automate, what to test manually, and how much is enough.

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10. 10

    Exploratory and security-minded testing

    ~8h

    Charters, heuristics and thinking like an attacker.

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