Course → 3 · Professional QA engineering → Career & Process — Agile, Compliance, Senior Bar

3 · Professional QA engineering

The senior QA hiring bar

18 min · Module 25

Seniors own outcomes: strategy, risk calls, mentoring, cross-team influence, and measurable quality improvements—not only more Selenium scripts.

Interview signal: explain a Lab-style release no-go with evidence; debug a flake; design API+UI layers; coach a junior.

Example / notes

# Senior portfolio idea from this project
# - strategy note for HelpDesk
# - automated smoke + API checks
# - RC escape analysis write-up
# - mentoring guide for work-board workflow

Practice in Lab: /lab/

← Compliance awareness for QA

Modules in this track

15. QA Foundations — Strategy & Planning
- Writing a test strategy
- Test planning and estimation
16. Test Design Techniques
17. API & Contract Testing
- HTTP API testing fundamentals
- Contract and schema testing
18. Performance Testing Basics
- Performance concepts and SLOs
- Designing a minimal performance check
19. Security Testing Basics
- Auth, sessions, and authorization
- OWASP-minded checks for web apps
20. Accessibility Testing
- Accessible by design checks
- Automated a11y smoke
21. Mobile Testing
- Mobile web quality risks
- Native apps and device farms (overview)
22. CI/CD, Quality Gates & Environments
- Pipelines and quality gates
- Environments and progressive delivery
23. Test Data, Environments & Observability
- Test data management
- Observability for QA
24. Soft Skills — Stakeholders, Mentoring, Metrics
- Stakeholder communication
- Mentoring and quality metrics/OKRs
25. Career & Process — Agile, Compliance, Senior Bar