DevOps QA tester course: building quality into CI/CD

Understand DevOps culture, put quality at every stage of the loop, lay the technical foundations of CI/CD and govern the pipeline. Each session lasts 2 h.

Week 1 — DevOps culture and principles

• S01 — What DevOps is: autonomy, frequent releases, early customer feedback
• S02 — Quality as a shared responsibility; the tester’s place in DevOps
• S03 — The DevOps loop: plan, build, test, release, deploy, operate, monitor
• S04 — Quality assurance (QA) within DevOps: roles and activities
• S05 — Introducing DevOps in an organization: blockers and levers

Week 2 — Quality in the value stream

• S06 — Value stream and quality engineering (QE)
• S07 — Shift-left and shift-right: test early and test in production
• S08 — Contributing at every stage of the DevOps loop
• S09 — Feedback loops: from monitoring back to planning
• S10 — Workshop: map the value stream of a practice product

Week 3 — Technical foundations for CI/CD

• S11 — Advanced Git: branches, merge strategies, code review
• S12 — Branching strategies: trunk-based, GitFlow, feature flags
• S13 — CI/CD principles: continuous integration, delivery and deployment
• S14 — Anatomy of a pipeline: stages, triggers, artifacts
• S15 — Workshop: a first CI pipeline that runs tests

Week 4 — Pipeline quality and governance

• S16 — Quality gates: block a release on a quality criterion
• S17 — Managing secrets and environment variables
• S18 — Traceability: from commit to deployment
• S19 — Test strategy in a DevOps context
• S20 — Competency gate P1: design a graded DevOps quality strategy

Build pipelines on GitHub Actions, GitLab CI and Jenkins, position the tests in them, tame flaky tests and master deployment strategies. Each session lasts 2 h.

Week 5 — GitHub Actions in depth

• S21 — GitHub Actions: workflows, jobs, steps, runners
• S22 — Matrices, caching, dependencies between jobs
• S23 — Running automated tests on pull requests
• S24 — Artifacts, reports, publishing results
• S25 — Workshop: a complete GitHub Actions pipeline with a quality gate

Week 6 — GitLab CI and Jenkins

• S26 — GitLab CI: .gitlab-ci.yml, stages, runners
• S27 — Jenkins: declarative pipeline, agents
• S28 — Comparing platforms: when to choose which
• S29 — Porting a test suite between CI platforms
• S30 — Workshop: port a pipeline from one platform to another

Week 7 — Automated testing in DevOps

• S31 — The test pyramid and execution strategy in the pipeline
• S32 — Unit and integration tests in CI
• S33 — End-to-end and API tests in the pipeline
• S34 — Test selection, parallelization, shorter feedback time
• S35 — Managing flaky tests in CI

Week 8 — Manual tasks and deployment

• S36 — What stays manual in DevOps: exploratory testing, reviews, business validation
• S37 — Deployment strategies: blue-green, canary, feature flags
• S38 — Controlled testing in production and rollback
• S39 — Workshop: a CD pipeline with progressive deployment and rollback
• S40 — Competency gate P2: build an end-to-end pipeline in class

Containerize an application and its tests, set up observability, manage quality with DORA metrics, then complete the Capstone. Each session lasts 2 h.

Week 9 — Containers

• S41 — Docker: images, containers, Dockerfile
• S42 — Containerizing an application and its test suite
• S43 — Docker Compose: reproducible test environments
• S44 — Introduction to orchestration (Kubernetes): concepts for testers
• S45 — Workshop: run the test suite in a container, in CI

Week 10 — Observability and monitoring

• S46 — The three pillars: logs, metrics, traces
• S47 — Prometheus and Grafana: collect and visualize
• S48 — Monitoring application health and alerts
• S49 — The shift-right loop: monitoring feeds testing
• S50 — Workshop: an observability dashboard for a service

Week 11 — Data-driven management and continuous improvement

• S51 — DORA metrics: deployment frequency, lead time, change failure rate, MTTR
• S52 — Measuring the quality and velocity of a DevOps team
• S53 — A DevOps quality report for stakeholders
• S54 — Continuous improvement: tool-supported retrospectives, action plan
• S55 — Workshop: DORA report and improvement plan

Week 12 — Capstone

• S56 — Scoping: product, value stream, quality strategy
• S57 — Building the CI/CD pipeline and the quality gates
• S58 — Containerization, tests in the pipeline, progressive deployment
• S59 — Observability, DORA metrics, quality report
• S60 — Competency gate P3: review of the pipeline and the report · Defense rehearsal

Two days of intensive preparation for the official exam: structured syllabus review by area, exercises, mock exams with commented answers, strategy and time management.

You receive a practice application (microservices architecture) and deliver a complete DevOps chain: value stream map, multi-stage CI/CD pipeline, automated and manual tests positioned in the loop, containerization, quality gates, progressive deployment, observability and a DORA metrics report. The defense, in front of a three-member panel that includes an external DevOps professional, focuses on justifying your choices: why this pipeline breakdown, which test at which stage, which quality gate and why.

• Assessment rule: a simple chain that you understand and can defend beats a stack of tools you do not master.

Full-time follows the same structure as our 399-hour QA Automation & AI Tester program: 371 h of virtual-classroom training, 14 h of one-on-one support and assessments, 14 h of ISTQB CT-QDO exam preparation. Sessions S01 to S60 above are covered in more depth, with supervised workshops every afternoon.

A seven-hour day

• 9:00 – 10:30 am — Concepts and demonstration
• 10:45 am – 12:30 pm — Guided workshop
• 1:30 – 3:30 pm — Independent workshop on the pipeline
• 3:45 – 5:00 pm — Review, correction, wrap-up

Each block ends with a competency gate; same ADC certificates, same Capstone and same ISTQB CT-QDO exam as the evening classes.