Sefism QA and Test Automation Cheat Sheet

What this cheat sheet is

The QA and test automation cheat sheet is the revision companion to Sefism's QA and test automation roadmap. It is written for students and early-career engineers moving into QA, and it turns each idea from the roadmap into a short entry you can reread in a minute: what the concept is, why it matters, often a concrete example or a code snippet, and the mistake people usually make with it.

It is not a course. It assumes you are learning the material elsewhere, through the roadmap's stages and resources, and gives you one place to check your understanding, look up a term or spot the classic mistake before it lands in your suite.

Three editions, one for each tool

The sheet follows the roadmap's choice of automation tool, so there are three editions:

• Playwright (the default): TypeScript snippets, with a chapter on locators, auto-waiting, fixtures, traces, sign-in state, network mocking and cross-browser projects.
• Selenium: Java snippets, with a chapter on WebDriver and Selenium Manager, locators, explicit waits, frames and windows, TestNG and JUnit 5, Grid and failure evidence.
• API testing: Postman and JavaScript, with a chapter on collections, environments, test scripts, chaining, JSON Schema validation, the Postman CLI and Newman, coded API tests, REST Assured and contract testing.

Each edition has nine chapters and between 76 and 77 concepts. The shared chapters are the same in all three; only the tool chapter and a handful of concepts (async code or classes, page objects or an API client layer) change.

Chapter by chapter

1. Testing fundamentals

Eight concepts: why we test, SDLC and STLC, verification and validation, test levels, functional and non-functional testing, the test pyramid, risk-based testing and the seven testing principles. Read this when someone asks why you test what you test.

2. Manual testing done well

Eleven concepts covering requirements analysis, equivalence partitioning, boundary value analysis, decision tables, test cases and checklists, exploratory testing, the bug report, severity and priority, the bug life cycle, smoke, sanity and regression testing, and test management tools. This is the chapter to reread before writing a test pack.

3. Web and API basics

Eight concepts on how browsers and servers talk: the HTTP request and response, methods, status codes, browser DevTools, JSON, REST APIs, cookies, sessions and tokens, and SQL for testers, with snippets for the request format, JSON and SQL.

4. Programming for testers

Eight concepts in your edition's language: variables and types, conditions, loops and functions, arrays, lists, maps and objects, async and await (Playwright and API) or classes and objects (Playwright and Selenium), packages and build tools, Git for testers and assertions. Most entries carry a short code example.

5. Your tool in depth

The chapter that differs by edition: Playwright in depth, Selenium in depth, or API testing in depth, as listed above. Almost every concept here has a snippet, so it works as a quick syntax reference while you write tests.

6. Maintainable suites

Nine concepts on test code that stays cheap to change: the Page Object Model or an API client layer, data-driven tests, test data management, independent tests, stable selectors and test ids, flaky tests, fixing flakiness and arrange, act, assert.

7. CI and reporting

Eight concepts for running the suite on every change: tests in a CI pipeline (with a workflow snippet), parallel runs and sharding, test reports, failure artefacts, test environments, secrets and configuration, what to run and when, and failure triage.

8. Performance, accessibility and security

Ten concepts at awareness level: load, stress, spike and soak tests, latency percentiles and error rate, a first k6 script, Apache JMeter, WCAG basics, automated and manual accessibility checks, security testing awareness, access control tests and a ZAP baseline scan.

9. Your QA career

Eight concepts on getting hired and growing: QA roles, ISTQB Foundation Level, a QA portfolio, public bug reports, take-home test tasks, "how would you test this?" questions, moving into SDET, and the QA job and training scams to avoid.

Each chapter also lists up to three resources from the Sefism library to go deeper with, such as the ISTQB Foundation Level syllabus, Playwright Documentation, Postman Learning Center and Grafana k6 Documentation.

Rules of thumb and the glossary

The sheet ends with ten rules of thumb, one sentence each. A few of them: test boundaries, not the middle; write the bug title as the symptom and the condition; push each check to the lowest level that can catch it; wait for conditions, never for time; treat a flaky test as a bug with an owner and a date; and never point automation or scanners at systems you are not authorised to test.

There is also a glossary of 131 short terms, and every concept joins it automatically, so you can search the sheet for an abbreviation you met in a job posting.

How to use it with the roadmap

• After each stage, read the matching chapter without notes and check you could explain each concept in your own words. If an entry surprises you, go back to that topic in the roadmap.
• While building, keep your edition's tool chapter open: the snippets are short enough to compare against your own code, and the pitfalls catch the common causes of failing suites.
• Before a technical round, reread the manual testing, CI and career chapters, and practise the "how would you test this?" entry out loud.

Inside the roadmap, topics link straight to the concepts in the sheet that cover them, in your edition.

How it works on Sefism

Everything on Sefism is free to learn from. The public page shows every chapter's title and introduction, and opens the first two chapters in full. Keeping the sheet uses credits and opens every chapter in the member area; new members get starting credits when they join. If you add the QA and test automation roadmap to your dashboard (your first roadmap is free), its cheat sheet comes with it.

Related on Sefism

• How to move from QA to software development
• QA Test Suite for an Open Source Web App, the project the sheet's career chapter has in mind.
• Restful-booker and The Internet practice site, for practising what the sheet describes.
• The SQL and databases cheat sheet, if the SQL entries here are not enough.

FAQ

Is this cheat sheet enough to learn QA? No. It is a revision tool. Use the roadmap and its resources to learn, and the sheet to check and remember.

Which edition should I pick? The one for the tool you are learning. If you are unsure, the roadmap's career stage suggests counting which tools 20 job postings in your market ask for.

Does it cover ISTQB? It explains what ISTQB Foundation Level is and how to decide whether it is worth taking, and its fundamentals chapter uses the same vocabulary. It is not an exam guide.

Can I use it without following the roadmap? Yes, but it is written in the roadmap's order, so it reads best alongside it.