About QALadder

The problem this exists for

If you're a manual tester, you've been told to "just learn automation" by someone who didn't say what to learn, in what order, or how you'd know you were making progress. So you start a Selenium course, stall in week three because the Python underneath was never solid, and start again somewhere else four months later.

Content isn't the bottleneck. There are ten thousand free hours of QA tutorials online right now. What's missing is sequence, feedback, and visible progress — knowing what comes next, being able to tell whether you actually learned the last thing, and seeing where you are on the climb.

That's what this site is. Not another library. A ladder with the rungs in order.

What's here

• The 24-week roadmap — ten modules from Python fundamentals to framework architecture and CI, in the order that actually works.
• 150 interview questions — manual, automation and SDET, each with a model answer, the follow-up that comes next, and the trap that ends interviews.
• The Code Lab — write and run real code in your browser, auto-graded against hidden tests. No local setup.
• The Locator Lab — drill CSS, XPath and Playwright locators against a deliberately messy live page, including a mode that mutates the page to test whether your locator survives.
• Seven QA tools — ATS resume checker, boundary value generator, metrics calculator, bug report builder, test plan generator, STAR story grader and take-home practice. All run in your browser.
• Take-home guides and scenario questions — the parts of the interview nobody prepares you for.

Who builds this

My name is Shahriyar, and I built QALadder.

It started as the answer to a question I couldn't answer well: what should someone actually do, in what order, to get from writing test cases to building the framework that runs them? Every version of the advice I found was either a list of tools with no sequence, or a course that assumed you already had the programming underneath. So I wrote the path out properly — twenty-four weeks, in order, with the practice built into each rung rather than bolted on at the end.

Everything here is mine: the roadmap, all 150 interview questions and their model answers, the Code Lab, the Locator Lab, the seven tools, and the server they run on. That's why it moves at the pace it does, and why nothing on the site reads like it came from a content team — because it didn't.

It's free, and it stays free. If you find something wrong, tell me and I'll fix it — that's how most of what's here got better.

How the content is made

Worth saying plainly, because a lot of career-advice content is spun from other career-advice content:

• Everything is original. Nothing is copied or reworded from other sites. Where a real company's publicly documented hiring assignment is described, I describe it in my own words with a link to the original.
• No invented numbers. No fabricated statistics, no made-up salary figures, no interview questions attributed to companies that never asked them. Where a claim can't be verified, it's stated qualitatively or left out.
• Written for a peer. The test every page has to pass: would an experienced engineer skim this and think "that person has actually done it".
• Corrections welcome. If something here is wrong, tell me and it gets fixed. That's a standing offer, not a formality.

How it stays free

The site runs on a small server and costs very little to operate. There's no paid tier planned, and the roadmap will not end up behind a login wall. If advertising is ever added to help cover costs, it will be disclosed in the privacy policy before it appears, and it won't be placed on the labs or tools.

Your progress belongs to you: you can export or delete your account and everything in it at any time, no questions asked.

Get in touch

Corrections, questions, requests, or a "this helped" — hello@qaladder.org, or see the contact page.