The Scenario
Your team has 100 manual test cases and limited automation engineering time. The QA lead asks you to recommend which five to automate first. The wrong answer is "all of them eventually". The right answer demonstrates the cost-versus-benefit thinking expected of a senior tester.
The Brief
From a hypothetical login, search, checkout, and admin module suite, pick five test cases to automate first. Write the automation specification for each in a way that an automation engineer could implement.
Deliverables
- A prioritisation matrix scoring candidate test cases on: execution frequency, automation cost, stability, and risk-of-failure
- Five automation specs, each containing: test name, preconditions, automation framework recommendation (Selenium, Cypress, Playwright), test steps in pseudocode, key assertions, test data strategy, and expected runtime
- A short paragraph explaining what you deliberately did not automate and why (the "expensive to automate, low value" cases)
- A maintenance plan: how often these tests will need updating, who owns them, and what flake-rate is acceptable before they get muted
Submission Guidance
Pseudocode is fine; you do not need to write real Selenium. The point is the thinking: which assertions matter, what test data setup is required, what flakiness risk you have introduced. A senior tester picks the boring repeatable cases first, not the exciting ones.
Submit Your Work
Your submission is graded against the rubric on the right. If you pass, you get a public Badge URL you can share on LinkedIn. There is no draft save, so work offline first and paste your finished response here.