🎮 Choose your path
Pick a track and start leveling up. Mark lessons complete as you go — your XP, levels and badges save automatically in this browser.
🧪 QA Roadmap — Manual · Automation · AI
From zero to QA Lead — the complete QA curriculum, in the order you need to learn it, with real-world examples at every step. Covers Manual, Automation, AI × QA, API, Performance & Security — choose your path and level up.
🌐 Play it as a gamified website: azaworld.github.io/qa-roadmap — pick a track, mark lessons complete, earn XP, levels & badges (saved in your browser), and practice on real apps in The Playground.
📊 See everything at a glance: the QA Learning Dashboard maps the whole curriculum, shows your progress ring & level, and links straight to every lesson and resource.
🗺️ Visualize & teach: Scenario Flowcharts — animated, interactive flowcharts for every core QA flow, each linked to a live demo site to teach from.
Most QA guides teach you definitions. This one teaches you the job: how to think about testing, how to write artifacts that engineers respect, how to run QA inside a real agile team, and how to grow from your first test case to leading a QA team — because I’ve walked every step of it (Mastercard, NYC healthcare, Bangladesh’s largest telecom, global e-commerce).
🗺️ The Journey — Start Here
Follow the stages in order — 🟢 Basic → 🟡 Intermediate → 🔴 Advanced. Each stage links to a full chapter with worked examples, an exercise, and sources to go deeper.
🟢 Basic — the foundation everything stands on
| Stage | Chapter | What you’ll be able to do after it |
|---|---|---|
| 0 | Foundations | Explain what QA actually is, how software gets built (SDLC), and where testing fits (STLC) |
| 1 | Test Design Techniques | Design smart test cases that find bugs with the fewest tests — EP, BVA, decision tables, state transitions |
| 2 | Test Artifacts | Write test plans, test cases, and bug reports that developers act on immediately |
🟡 Intermediate — working like a professional
| Stage | Chapter | What you’ll be able to do after it |
|---|---|---|
| 3 | Types of Testing | Know every kind of testing — functional, non-functional, API, mobile, data — when to use each, and how to run it manually |
| 4 | QA in Agile Teams | Work a real sprint: defect lifecycle, severity vs priority, release gates, QA metrics, risk-based testing |
| 5 | The QA Toolbox | Jira, TestRail/QASE, Postman, browser DevTools, SQL, proxy tools — the daily drivers |
| 9 | Soft Skills | Communicate, negotiate, and report like the tester everyone wants on their team |
| + | Tech Foundations | Exactly how much coding, SQL, algorithms & AI you need — scoped by role, so you learn what matters and skip what doesn’t |
🔴 Advanced — growing beyond the role
| Stage | Chapter | What you’ll be able to do after it |
|---|---|---|
| 6 | Career Journey | Map yourself Junior → Mid → Senior → Lead, build a portfolio, get hired |
| 7 | Interview Preparation | Answer the questions that actually get asked — with model answers |
| CV | QA Resume & CV | Write an ATS-friendly Junior, Mid, Senior QA or SDET resume with copy-ready templates and measurable bullets |
| 8 | Path to Automation | Know when and how to add automation without abandoning your manual craft |
| 10 | Sources & Further Learning | The curated library: books, courses, practice sites, podcasts — with a per-stage reading map |
🚀 Specialist Tracks — go deep where the market pays
| Stage | Chapter | What you’ll be able to do after it |
|---|---|---|
| 11 | AI × QA (MCP + Playwright) | Use AI on every QA task, drive browsers with AI agents via MCP, test AI systems (evals), and steer your career into AI QA |
| 12 | API Testing Deep Dive | Own API quality end-to-end: HTTP, negative design, auth, contract testing, GraphQL, automation-ready Postman/Newman |
| 13 | Security Testing | Find the OWASP Top 10 bugs functional testing misses — IDOR, XSS, injection — with ZAP/Burp, ethically |
| 14 | Automation Deep Dive | Build real, maintainable UI + API automation: Playwright/Selenium, the pyramid, POM, locators & waits, data-driven, CI/CD, reporting |
| 15 | Performance Testing | Load, stress, spike & soak testing with k6/JMeter — percentile metrics, methodology, bottleneck analysis, CI gates |
| 16 | AI-Powered QA (100×) | Become the 100× tester: what to know before AI, what to automate, the speed playbook, adoption ladder, prompt library, guardrails & metrics |
🎯 The Capstone — put it all together
Get Hired as a Sr. QA — the Modern Ladder ties the whole roadmap into one climb: rung-by-rung Learn → Build → Prove, the modern AI + Automation + MCP workflow (with step-by-step MCP setup), a Sr. QA readiness checklist, and a 6-month plan. Start here if you want the end-to-end path to the job.
Templates you can copy today: Test Plan · Test Case · Bug Report · QA Resume / CV
Worked examples: E-commerce checkout test cases · Real bug report
📚 Career & interview prep: QA Resume & CV — Junior → SDET · Interview Bank (Top 100+ Q&A) · 🤖 AI Tools Directory (auto-updated) · Cheatsheets · 🎬 Teaching Kit — live demo sites (screen-share these to teach any section, no slides)
🇧🇩 Job hunting in Bangladesh? Browse the searchable directory of 235+ BD software companies — filter by tech stack or location to find where to apply.
🎓 Guided courses: prefer video + a certificate? Take these as courses on AZADEMY — the roadmap is the free textbook, the academy is the classroom.
🎯 Who this is for
- Complete beginners who want a realistic path into tech without writing code first
- Junior QA engineers who know the definitions but want to work like a senior
- Developers & PMs who want to understand what great QA looks like
- Manual testers deciding when (and whether) to move into automation
👤 Why listen to me — what I’ve actually done
I’m Arifuzzaman “Antor” (azantor.xyz) — today Founder & CEO of AZAI Labs, Co-Founder & CTO of Upward, Technical Project Manager at Platformz, and Sr. SDET at Kintsugi. Before all that, I spent 6+ years as a QA engineer, climbing the exact ladder this roadmap describes: Junior QA → QA Lead → SDET/TPM → founder. This is the guide I wish I had on day one. The receipts:
- 💳 Mastercard — Sr. Automation & Reliability Engineer: chaos engineering on payment-critical systems
- 🏥 Kinetik (NYC healthcare) — QA Engineer I → QA Lead: owned quality for a NEMT platform (13M+ trips, $1.1B+ claims); shipped the iOS & Android apps
- 🛒 Platformz / FUR4 — led a 30+ person team; delivered a 12-month 3P EDI program in ~60 days across Amazon, Walmart, Target, Chewy, eBay & Macy’s
- 📱 Grameenphone (MyGP) — backend automation from zero for Bangladesh’s largest mobile operator
- 🏛️ Government / civic tech — OpenCRVS (UN-backed civil registration), IPEMIS, Sothik (AI Bangla spell-checker, QA lead)
- ⭐ Upwork Top Rated — 23 jobs completed, every single one rated ★5.0
Every template in this repo is a cleaned-up version of an artifact I’ve used on real projects. 👉 Read the full story & experience →
🚀 How to use this repo
- Read stages 0–2 first — they’re the foundation everything else stands on
- Do the exercises at the end of each chapter (yes, actually do them)
- Copy the templates into your own projects — make them yours
- Star ⭐ this repo so you can come back as you progress
💬 Questions, feedback, or want to share your progress? Open an issue — I read them.
📜 License
MIT — learn from it, fork it, share it. Attribution appreciated.
azantor.xyz · @azaworld · Turns chaos into shipped products.