SDET / Test Automation Engineer
Own a suite, including tests a model wrote. Judgment first, then API, Selenium WebDriver, Playwright, Cypress, Appium, frameworks, CI quality gates, and AI you still verify. Not a coding bootcamp — you read, edit, and reject automation.
This is not fluff. On this path you practice:
- Automation that holds up in a real suite
- API testing across REST / GraphQL
- Selenium, Playwright, Cypress, and Appium — you pick the right stack
- How to verify tests and code that AI generated
- Debugging a flaky test to root cause
- A solo lab and a take-home suite you can show (API + one UI tool + CI)
Included with this plan: the starter lab and the portfolio capstone— you run both alone. No group call.
Free to learn — no account required
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Your first SDET step. Decide what is worth automating, what will rot, and what a trusted suite looks like — before you pick Selenium or Playwright.
Test the backend first. Status, contracts, and failures that UI tests miss. You own the API checks a pipeline can fail on.
Read, edit, and extend a Selenium WebDriver suite: drivers, locators, waits, Page Object Model, data, and Grid/CI. You do not start from a blank Java class — you take a living suite and put your name on the next change.
Own a Playwright suite: fixtures, locators, traces, APIRequestContext, and CI. Industry default for new web automation in 2026. Sits next to Selenium — it does not replace the suites you already maintain.
Become the SDET who owns frontend quality with unmatched speed and debuggability. Deep dive into Cypress 13+ architecture (no WebDriver!), custom commands, API interception & mocking, visual regression (Percy/Applitools), accessibility gates (cypress-axe), parallel runs with Cypress Cloud, and CI/CD integration — the modern gold-standard for React, Vue, Angular, and all web apps in 2025.
Become the mobile SDET who delivers reliable, scalable automation across Android + iOS. Deep dive into Appium 2.x architecture, capabilities, drivers, flake-proof locators & waits, W3C gestures, hybrid context switching, real-device cloud integration, CI/CD gates with reporting, and how to build maintainable suites that survive fragmentation and rapid releases — the gold-standard mobile automation skill in 2025.
Become the SDET who delivers unbreakable frontend confidence. Master why UI automation is mission-critical, understand 2025 test pyramid for modern web (Cypress vs Playwright), build flake-proof tests with resilient locators & auto-waits, automate visual regression & accessibility, integrate into CI/CD with gates & reporting, and create maintainable suites that survive rapid UI changes — the essential skill for React, Angular, Vue, and all web apps in 2025.
Own the pipeline that separates great teams from chaotic ones. Learn why bad deploys still cost companies millions in 2025, how to design fast, reliable CI/CD with GitHub Actions / GitOps, integrate every test type (unit → perf → security), set unbreakable quality gates, handle flakiness like a pro, and turn deployments into non-events.
Prompting is how you ask for a draft. The job is still yours: read what was generated, keep / rewrite / kill, and put your name on the keepers. Not a generate-more course.
Master the game-changing skill of using AI to eliminate flaky tests. Learn why flakiness costs teams $1.2M+ annually, how Uber used AI to auto-fix 47% of flakes, and how to use LLMs (Grok 2, Claude 3.5, GPT-4o) and tools like ReportPortal to pinpoint non-deterministic causes. Turn weeks of debugging into minutes.
Solo homework: run the API contract, extend the Playwright todo spec, explain the planted flake, keep or kill the AI draft. Then the capstone.
1. Clone, run, decide
Take-home: run the order-desk API tests, run the Playwright spec, add one change that is yours, and explain the quality gate. Solo homework, not a class.
1. Ship a small suite
Discover Selenium — the most widely used open-source tool for automating browsers. Learn why it’s still the gold standard for web UI testing and how to take your first steps.
Compare QA specialization tracks by the problems they solve, the evidence employers expect, and the smallest project you can build before committing.