Stage by Stage
Not a highlight reel. What actually happened.
The First Filter
They screened everyone before anything started. Analytical thinking, attention to detail, basic seriousness. I made it through. That was the first time I thought QA might actually be something for me.
Functional Testing Basics
First real task. Test scenarios, test cases, and bug reports for a registration feature. I passed but the feedback was clear: test steps too vague, format not right, one scenario was outside scope entirely. I thought I had done well. I had not. First lesson: writing things down is not the same as writing them clearly enough for someone else to reproduce exactly what you did.
API Testing and the Postman Mistake
My lowest score. I submitted a JSON file when I was supposed to submit a Postman collection link. I genuinely did not know the difference. A mentor named Shehasnoname gave a second chance and I used it. That stage taught me more about reading instructions carefully than any other.
Automation and a Bad Day
My code worked. I had run it myself. On the day of the presentation, Git Bash would not run. I could not show anything. The code ran fine right after the presentation ended. On top of that, I had hardcoded values in the repo instead of using real test data. I failed. I was not ready to stop so I paid for premium to stay in.
CI/CD and Changing My Approach
The feedback was blunt. My tests were AI-generated and I had not bothered to understand them. I had not applied anything from Stage 3 either. The mentor said I needed to go back to basics. That was fair. I was still on premium. But this time I did not just survive the stage. I changed how I was working. From here everything I submitted came from actually doing the work myself.
ClinSight: Real Team, Real Work
First time working inside a cross-functional team. I built a full QA test plan for the ClinSight MVP covering authentication, OTP verification, API validation, and session handling. It had entry criteria, exit criteria, risk assessment, and a proper testing strategy. I got assigned actual tickets, wrote test cases, executed them, and logged defects. It felt like a real job.
Exploratory Testing and a Formatting Note
Passed, but the feedback pointed at something I had been ignoring: my document formatting was poor. The mentor said half of QA work is in how you present your findings. If it is not properly formatted, it is not good enough. I had been so focused on finding bugs that I was not thinking about how someone else would read what I wrote. That changed after this stage.
Accessibility and API Security
24 accessibility bugs, varied and not duplicates. The one I was most proud of: a keyboard tabbing issue where pressing past the Next button could trigger a violation. The reviewer called it an excellent catch because it touched accessibility, user fairness, and product logic at the same time. I also logged 12 API security findings against OWASP Top 10 and built a risk assessment that traced a full attack chain.
Performance Testing: My Best Stage
Load, soak, stress, spike testing with k6. Lighthouse for frontend. Partway through I discovered that my original tests had been measuring the rejection path only. Wrong passwords meant the server never did real login work, so my "fast" results were measuring how quickly it said no, not how fast it could actually log someone in. I stopped, admitted it, retested with real credentials, and corrected everything. At 20 users the real authenticated flow was already at 5.2 seconds. At 150 it stopped working. After all of it, failing stages, paying to stay, getting honest feedback throughout, finishing this stage well meant a lot.