Yesterday you built a three-line triage case for the discount bug and timed yourself saying it. Today, the map for after this course.
Look at what you have already produced: a promise list, test cases with boundary coverage, two real bug reports, an exploratory session with a debrief, and a triage case. Tomorrow you put it all together and make a release call. So today is about what comes next, in the order that pays off.
The order I would learn things in
- HTTP and APIs. You opened the network tab on Day 6. Go deeper: what a request and response are, what status codes mean, and how to send a request yourself in Postman (a free tool for exactly that). You already fired one in the console on my API Testing Checklist; that page is the on-ramp.
- SQL, at a beginner level. Read-only queries: SELECT, WHERE, JOIN. You will use it to check that what the screen says matches what is actually stored. A lot of the bugs I filed on real retail e-commerce platforms were exactly that: the price on the screen did not match the price in the database, the review count did not match the published reviews. Day 6 taught you why that class of bug matters; SQL is how you catch it at scale.
- One automation tool, learned properly. This is the next course in this series, and everything you built this week carries over: the promises become assertions, the boundary values become test data, and Tumble Kitchen stays your practice target. When you are ready, Test Automation Basics picks up exactly where tomorrow ends.
- Git and pull requests. Getting a copy of the team’s code onto your machine, running the tests, leaving a review comment. The baseline on any modern team.
- AI in QA, once the fundamentals hold. AI amplifies a good tester and hides the gaps of a weak one. It is the third course in this series, and it assumes the judgment you built here.
Workflow
- APIs
- SQL basics
- Automation (course 2)
- Git + PRs
- AI in QA (course 3)
Where to go deeper, free
- My QA Career Roadmap is the interactive version of this whole map: 53 checkpoints across seven stages, with progress that saves as you go. Everything this course taught lives in stages one and two; tick them off, it is satisfying.
- Test Automation University has free structured courses on all of it. I am an author there, and it is where I would start for step three.
- Ministry of Testing is the community side: honest conversations about how testing actually works inside teams.
Honest notes on the path
- Depth beats breadth. Good at one tool beats okay at four.
- You will feel behind. Everyone does. Keep going.
- Find one person more senior and ask what they wish they had learned earlier. Then learn that.
Do this today
Open the roadmap, find stage one, and honestly tick what this course already covered. You will be surprised how much of it there is. Then rest your testing eyes, because tomorrow is the capstone: the full job, start to finish, on your own. Set aside about ninety minutes for it instead of the usual thirty; it is the whole job in one sitting.