QA

roadmap.sh: https://roadmap.sh/qa

Suggested path through the QA nodes. Each node links to its lesson when written.

Nodes

Fundamentals

• What is software testing
• QA vs QC vs testing
• Role of a QA engineer
• Seven principles of testing
• Software development life cycle (SDLC)
• Software testing life cycle (STLC)
• Verification vs validation
• Defect / bug / error / failure
• Cost of defects

Testing methods

• Manual testing
• Automation testing
• Black-box testing
• White-box testing
• Grey-box testing
• Static vs dynamic testing
• Exploratory testing
• Ad-hoc testing

Levels of testing

• Unit testing
• Integration testing
• System testing
• Acceptance testing (UAT)
• Smoke & sanity testing
• Regression testing
• End-to-end testing

Types of testing

• Functional testing
• Non-functional testing
• Performance testing
• Load & stress testing
• Security testing
• Usability testing
• Accessibility testing
• Compatibility & cross-browser testing
• Localization & internationalization testing
• API testing
• Mobile testing
• Database testing

Test design techniques

• Equivalence partitioning
• Boundary value analysis
• Decision table testing
• State transition testing
• Use case testing
• Pairwise / combinatorial testing
• Error guessing

Test documentation & process

• Test plan
• Test strategy
• Test cases & test scenarios
• Requirements traceability matrix
• Test data management
• Defect / bug reporting
• Defect life cycle
• Severity vs priority
• Entry & exit criteria
• Test metrics & reporting

Test management tools

• Jira
• TestRail
• Zephyr
• Xray
• Bug tracking workflows

Automation fundamentals

• Why & when to automate
• Test automation pyramid
• Choosing a programming language
• Page Object Model
• Data-driven testing
• Keyword-driven testing
• Behavior-driven development (BDD)
• Flaky tests & how to handle them

Automation tools

• Selenium
• Cypress
• Playwright
• WebdriverIO
• Appium (mobile)
• Postman / REST-assured (API)
• JMeter / k6 / Gatling (performance)
• Cucumber (BDD)
• TestNG / JUnit / pytest

CI/CD & DevOps for QA

• Version control with Git
• Continuous integration
• Running tests in pipelines (Jenkins, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI)
• Docker for test environments
• Parallel & cross-browser execution
• Reporting & dashboards (Allure)
• Shift-left testing

Specialized & advanced

• Agile & Scrum testing
• Risk-based testing
• Contract testing
• Visual regression testing
• Chaos testing
• AI in testing
• Soft skills & communication

Resources

See resources.md.

Project ideas

• Build an end-to-end test suite for a real demo app (e.g. SauceDemo) using Playwright with the Page Object Model and run it in GitHub Actions.
• Write an API test collection in Postman or REST-assured against a public API, covering happy paths, edge cases and schema validation.
• Set up a JMeter or k6 load test for an endpoint, capture metrics under increasing concurrency, and write a short performance report.