QA Foundations

A plain-language introduction for new testers: what testing is and isn't, seven principles every tester should know, the main levels and types, and a practice session on a deliberately buggy demo shop with a list of real bugs to check your findings against.

A practical guide to test cases: what to include, three techniques for choosing inputs, ten real cases for a checkout form with the results we observed, and how the cases become an automated test. Three of the ten raised questions the form's requirements don't answer.

We found a real bug in a practice shop and wrote it up two ways. The difference between 30 and 100 points is steps, expected versus actual, environment, reproducibility, and evidence. Each part is explained with the exact lines from the report.

Where the test pyramid comes from, the only widely cited ratios and what their authors said about them, the ice cream cone and hourglass antipatterns, and a rule for choosing the layer of each new test.

A practical path to tests in CI: the GitHub Actions workflow Playwright generates and what each line does, the additions a real project needs (taken from this site's pipeline), and how to shard a slow suite and merge the results into one report.