Learn / Roadmap
The SDET Roadmap
What to learn, in what order, to go from testing fundamentals to senior SDET. Each stage links to the lessons, labs, tools and interview questions on SDETRole that cover it. Durations are rough guides for part-time study, not promises.
- 01
Testing foundations
Manual QA → Junior QA · 3–4 weeks
Think like a tester: find risk, design cases that catch bugs, and report them clearly.
- SDLC and STLC
- Test design: equivalence partitioning, boundary values, decision tables, state transitions
- Bug lifecycle, severity vs priority
- Exploratory testing with charters
- Agile ceremonies and where QA fits
- SQL for verifying data
- 02
Programming for automation
Junior QA → Automation Engineer · 6–8 weeks
Write clean code in one language well. Pick TypeScript (Playwright) or Java (Selenium/REST Assured).
- Variables, control flow, functions
- Arrays, maps, sets and string manipulation
- OOP: classes, composition, interfaces
- Exceptions and error handling
- Async code: promises and async/await
- Git basics: branch, commit, pull request
- 03
API testing
Automation Engineer · 3–4 weeks
Test the layer where most business logic lives, faster and more reliably than through the UI.
- HTTP methods, status codes, headers
- REST design and idempotency
- Auth: API keys, bearer tokens, OAuth 2.0 basics
- Postman collections and environments
- Automated API tests in Playwright or REST Assured
- Schema validation and contract testing
- 04
UI automation and framework design
Automation Engineer → SDET 1 · 6–8 weeks
Build a maintainable UI suite: stable locators, no sleeps, clean page objects, data that doesn’t collide.
- Playwright or Selenium fundamentals
- Locator strategy and accessibility-first selectors
- Auto-waiting, explicit waits and web-first assertions
- Page Object Model and fixtures
- Test data management
- Reporting, traces and debugging flaky tests
- 05
CI/CD and DevOps for QA
SDET 1 → SDET 2 · 3–4 weeks
Make tests a fast, trusted signal in the delivery pipeline.
- GitHub Actions or Jenkins pipelines
- Parallel and sharded runs
- Docker for reproducible environments
- Kubernetes concepts: pods, services, namespaces
- Quality gates and flaky-test policy
- 06
Advanced quality engineering
SDET 2 → Senior SDET · ongoing
Own quality for a system, not just a test suite.
- Performance testing with k6 or JMeter, reading percentiles
- Security testing basics and the OWASP Top 10
- Accessibility testing (WCAG 2.2, axe)
- Test strategy and architecture for distributed systems
- Observability and reliability
- 07
AI in quality engineering
Senior SDET → Lead / Architect · ongoing
Use AI tools responsibly in your workflow and test AI features with rigour.
- LLM-assisted test design with human review
- Agentic browser automation and MCP (emerging)
- Testing LLM applications: evals, golden sets, LLM-as-judge
- Prompt-injection and data-leakage testing
- Knowing where AI should not be the release gate