I once spent real effort turning a test suite people had stopped trusting back into one they did. Every run ended with a handful of reds, everyone knew a rerun would clear most of them, and the greens told you nothing because the assertions barely checked anything. Nobody trusted it, so nobody acted on it, and a suite nobody acts on is worse than no suite at all. It costs you a run every night and buys you nothing.
That suite did not get that way because the tools were bad. Playwright, Cypress, Selenium, WebdriverIO are all capable. It got that way because automation was treated as a coding exercise instead of a testing one: every manual test automated one for one, nobody asking whether the test deserved to exist.
This course builds the other kind. Small, honest, green when the product is good, red when it is broken, and red for reasons worth reading.
Automation is not a coding exercise. It is a testing exercise that happens to use code.
How the three weeks run
Everything runs. On Day 2 you install Playwright and see your first green run on your own machine. From then on, you build a real suite against Tumble Kitchen, the practice store on my site. It is a real page with a real (deliberately slow) data feed, real prices in JMD, and at least two real bugs. Your suite is going to catch both.
- Week one, Days 1 to 6. Foundations: locators, an honest framework pick with a green run on day two, just enough JavaScript to read every line you type, and your first real test explained line by line.
- Week two, Days 7 to 14. The suite: page objects, assertions that mean something, waiting on real signals, your own test data, API checks, and a cart suite that catches a real bug.
- Week three, Days 15 to 20. Professional practice: diagnosing red runs, flake and maintenance, running in CI on every push, strategy, and a capstone suite.
If you took my QA Fundamentals course, this is the same store, and the test cases you designed there become the tests you automate here. If you did not, no problem; each lesson stands alone.
The certificate and the portfolio
The final email gives you a private code for a 30-question competency assessment with a visible clock. Passing knowledge is not enough for the certificate. You also write locators and a complete test in the assessment, then submit a five-test suite with page objects, honest waits, an API check, CI evidence, and one truthful red result. I review and run that work against the published rubric before the certificate is issued.
Two things to know going in
- You do not need to be a developer. You need to be willing to read and type code, and it is genuinely less than people fear. Days 3 to 5 teach the only JavaScript this course needs.
- The typing is the learning. Reading about automation is not doing it, so do the daily piece at a keyboard.
Do this today
Think about the last automated test you saw fail on your team, and whether anyone could say what it was actually testing. If nobody could, you have already met the problem this course exists to fix.
Talk tomorrow.