Interview questions about testing, answered one at a time.

Crisp definitions + live test-design + metric literacy + own the CI quality gate & evidence-backed go/no-go. STOP before ISTQB cert, TMMi, company-wide QE org strategy.

• MUST 15
• SHOULD 30
• STRETCH 2
• SKIP 4
• 6 lessons

Design/own/defend a reliable CI-friendly Playwright framework; Selenium literacy (52% of JDs) + BDD/Cucumber. STOP before self-healing engines, custom runners, grid infra.

• MUST 17
• SHOULD 13
• STRETCH 2
• SKIP 2
• 15 lessons

Own REST/auth/JWT/schema/chaining + one strategy layer (contract+mocking+microservices pyramid). #1 cluster (69%). STOP before OAuth crypto internals, SOAP mastery, Kafka internals.

• MUST 14
• SHOULD 10
• STRETCH 7
• SKIP 2
• 8 lessons

The 'design from scratch' narrative + core patterns + fixtures + CI/parallel. STOP before test platforms, custom runners. Over-patterning is a negative signal.

• MUST 19
• SHOULD 10
• STRETCH 3
• SKIP 2
• 14 lessons

Full OOP/decorators/generators + deep Pytest; DSA ONLY Easy→comfortable-Medium (0/90 JDs ask Hard). STOP before LeetCode Hard/DP, metaclasses, CPython internals.

• MUST 25
• SHOULD 14
• STRETCH 2
• SKIP 1
• 4 lessons

Application-level TS to read/write/maintain a Playwright suite (async/await is the real gap). Unlocks the 13% TS-only roles. STOP before compiler-level type gymnastics.

• MUST 13
• SHOULD 14
• STRETCH 7
• SKIP 3
• 7 lessons

Own the TEST STAGE — 'I consume the platform, I own the test stage.' Jenkins slightly outranks GH Actions in our pool. STOP before Jenkins admin, K8s ops, Terraform, deployment mechanics.

• MUST 14
• SHOULD 15
• STRETCH 9
• SKIP 3
• 17 lessons

Competent user of ONE tool (k6) with a CI gate + results literacy. SHOULD-level differentiator, not a MUST gate. STOP before LoadRunner, JVM tuning, capacity modelling.

• MUST 11
• SHOULD 11
• STRETCH 4
• SKIP 6
• 9 lessons

Up to window functions + CTEs; SQL-as-test-oracle. A hard MUST (~35/50 JDs), not a quiet filter; ETL reconciliation is a MUST for Tekion/Cognizant. STOP before query tuning, DBA ops, pipeline authoring.

• MUST 16
• SHOULD 11
• STRETCH 12
• SKIP 4
• 6 lessons

Fluent USER to run/debug tests, never owner. Docker highest ROI; K8s = actually-run kubectl (Apply). STOP before certs, Terraform/IaC, cluster ops.

• MUST 9
• SHOULD 12
• STRETCH 3
• SKIP 5
• 11 lessons

Build & own an LLM eval harness in CI (Part A) + AI-assisted testing is now table-stakes (Part B). Capability-first vocabulary. STOP before training/fine-tuning, transformer internals, MLOps.

• MUST 16
• SHOULD 20
• STRETCH 6
• SKIP 3
• 15 lessons

• MUST 4
• 1 lesson

• MUST 3
• 1 lesson