Live Hands-On Course · Coming Later in 2026
API Testing Upgraded for the AI Era
Your team is pushing more code than ever — and AI is about to multiply that tenfold. More code nobody fully reviewed, more endpoints to cover, and new risks that didn’t exist before: token costs bleeding your CI pipeline, AI-generated code nobody audited, security surfaces you haven’t mapped yet.
The testing strategy you’ve been running wasn’t built for this. It didn’t account for this volume, this speed, or these risks. You need a new one.
The API Testing Masterclass: The Strategist is a 7-week live course where you’ll learn to build a strategy customized to your reality — risk-prioritized, AI-aware, and documented in professional deliverables you can use at work the following week.
Limited to 20 seats. Live on Zoom. Not a video course.
5 Modules · 7 Weeks · 20 Seats · 5 Professional Deliverables · 1 Blueprint Challenge
The Old Playbook Is Broken. Here's What Replaces It.
You’ve got API tests. Probably a lot of them. And you’ve been adding more, feature by feature, sprint by sprint. That’s what the job asked for.
But you’ve noticed something. More and more code is coming from the developers — AI-assisted, AI-generated, faster than ever. It wasn’t possible to cover everything before. Now, you can’t even lie to yourself about it.
You need a better system. A strategy that helps you make decisions about coverage and risk. One that accounts for what you can do with AI — and what AI can do to you.
An effective strategy takes a lot into account: testability of the system, the state of your existing tests, new risks and new skills, and new things you need to track to actually assess quality. And it’s not a one-time document anymore. The strategy keeps you moving forward — as features are added, tests become flaky, and AI becomes a lot more prevalent in every part of the pipeline.
It also helps you explain to management: where are we, and how are we handling it. Can we release — and more importantly, based on what.
Before the AI era, your old strategy — if you actually had one — may have worked. And you could remain a “tester.” But QA has a new meaning now: Quality Architect. The one who creates the strategy, executes it, and adapts it when things change.
And boy, do they change.
That's what this course prepares you for. Prepare to become the new QA.
Is This You?
This course is for you if:
- You're a QA Lead defining testing strategy for a team or department — and you know the current one isn't holding up.
- You're a Test Architect designing quality frameworks for microservice architectures and need to account for AI in the picture.
- You're a Senior SDET ready to move from individual contributor to technical leadership — and you want the strategic toolkit to back it up.
- You're an Engineering Manager who needs to understand, govern, and explain your team's testing practice to stakeholders.
This is NOT for you if:
- You're primarily looking to improve your day-to-day test writing, debugging, and execution skills. (That's The Tactician — coming later.)
- You haven't done API testing before. This course assumes experience.
- You're looking for a Postman tutorial or tool-specific training. This is about how to think, not which buttons to click
Prerequisite
You should be comfortable reading and modifying Python code. You don’t need to be a Python developer — but exercises use Python, and you need to be able to follow along.
Before and After: The Shift
- AI is generating more code every month. You're expected to keep up. Nobody gave you a playbook for that.
- You're trying to cover more ground, but the codebase grows faster than your test suite ever will.
- You have a test plan, but it's based on what's easy to test — not what actually carries the most risk.
- Environment issues eat hours every week, because you're stuck with somebody else's idea of a testing environment.
- Test data is copied and modified — not managed, not versioned. You reproduce scenarios from logs, not data files.
- Leadership asks "can we release?" and you say yes — but you don't know about everything you didn't get to test.
- You know your test suite has waste in it. You don't have a way to prune it to its correct size and coverage.
- "We test what matters most, and here's why."
- Your test strategy is a risk-prioritized architecture.
- State management is a first-class design concern you own.
- Your data strategy covers generation, coverage, and lifecycle — including a framework for when AI gives you a different answer every time.
- You present quality metrics and investment recommendations in business terms.
- You know the ROI of every test category and can defend it.
- All test code — human or AI-written — goes through governance standards you defined.
- You think about quality over time — not just this sprint, but the long game. Flakiness trends, knowledge decay, quality drift. You see them coming.
Quality Architects operate differently. This course is designed to give you the mindset, viewpoints, and practices to get there.
Five Modules. Five Deliverables. One Complete Strategy.
Every module ends with something concrete — a step on the way to the blueprint. By the end of the course, they make a complete API Testing Strategy Blueprint.
Every module gives you tools you’ll use with your team. The Blueprint Challenge gives you the document you present to leadership.
Between modules, you apply the frameworks to your own APIs and share what you found. This isn’t an academic exercise — it’s immediately applicable.
You'll learn how to use risk-based analysis, from both functional and non-functional aspects. How to categorize and group tests together, and how knowledge of system architecture impacts your test design choices. You'll also learn how to build data and state-management strategy into your planning from day one, and how to use AI to speed things up in different ways.
State pollution, dependencies, concurrency, stale data — these are the real reasons tests break. Not bad logic. Bad assumptions. And when AI-generated code brings its own assumptions about state, the problem multiplies.
You'll learn to diagnose state management problems in a test suite, understand why environments betray you, and design tests that are resilient by default — setup patterns, isolation, teardown strategies, and environment validation.
APIs are notorious for being variant in the face of data. Different combinations can affect whole test scenarios.
Test data isn't a technical detail. It's a strategic planning concern. Especially when you want to cover more risks.
You'll learn how to pick the right kind of data for your tests — what you need to push the system in the way you need. You'll use AI to generate data, manage it, and qualify it for the intended tests.
Test data is a first-class asset. You need to manage it as such, rather than an afterthought.
What does your test suite actually cost — across its entire lifecycle? How do you audit a bloated suite? What's the real price of "just add more tests" when AI can generate them for free?
You'll audit a test suite for economic health — redundancy, dead tests, shallow assertions. You'll learn CI/CD pipeline economics, parallelization tradeoffs, AI token budgets, and the ROI metrics that connect your testing practice to business outcomes. Every test has a cost. Most teams have never measured it.
How do you keep quality high over months and years, with so much changing so fast?
You'll learn to think about quality over time — exploration strategy, flakiness trends, knowledge decay, quality drift. With AI, you'll tackle new threats that didn't exist before, like security concerns and prompt injections. Or knowledge decaying because AI generates and reviews all the code for the dev team.
Your CI report may show all green — but what are the passing tests actually telling you? With all the information you have, you'll need to decide if you're ready for release. You'll build quality gate assessments that combine everything — test results, coverage, economics, risk — and help make release decisions you can defend. This is the module that separates strategists from technicians.
The Blueprint Challenge: Prove You Can Do It Cold
After the final module, you’ll receive a system scenario you’ve never seen before. Different system, different constraints, different risks. Your job: produce a complete API Testing Strategy Blueprint from scratch. Three parts:
In the final session, volunteers present their blueprint to the group. Then I walk through my own solution for the same scenario — so you can see a different approach and compare notes.
You don’t just learn frameworks on my examples. You apply them to something new. That’s the real test.
What You Get
The Learning Experience
5 live sessions on Zoom (2 hours each, recorded)
Recordings available for course duration + 60 days
Hands-on exercises every module against a realistic API application
Between-module homework: apply frameworks to your own APIs
The Blueprint Challenge: build a complete strategy from a new scenario
Resources & Support
Private GitHub repo with exercises and starter code
Slack community — enrollment through 60 days post-course
3 bi-weekly office hours (30-min drop-in Zoom)
Certificate of Completion (requires Blueprint Challenge submission)
Templates: ROI calculator, strategy charter, governance framework
The Schedule
7 weeks. Live on Zoom.
WEEK
What Happens
Week 1
Module 1: The Strategic Planner
Week 2
Module 2: State & Environment Mastery
Week 3
Module 3: The Data Strategist
Week 4
Buffer week — catch up, integrate, no new content
Week 5
Module 4: The Economics of API Testing
Week 6
Module 5: The Long Game
Week 7
The Blueprint Challenge
All sessions are recorded. But this course is built for participation - live is where the value is.
Your Instructor
“Brilliant trainer. Innovative concepts, fantastic visuals.” — Ilan Kirschenbaum, Engineering Professional
Gil Zilberfeld
Testing Educator · Consultant · Author
I’ve been in software for 25 years — developer, tester, manager, consultant. I’ve seen every era of this industry from the inside, including every wave of “this changes everything.”
Author of Everyday Unit Testing. Speaker at Agile Testing Days, Nordic Testing Days, and dozens more conferences. I’ve trained and consulted for teams across the globe on API testing strategy, clean code, and what happens when organizations move fast without thinking about quality.
AI is not the first revolution. But it is the fastest. And the one most likely to cover up the problems rather than fix them. That’s why I built this course — not to teach you another tool, but to give you the strategic thinking that no tool can replace.
Twenty-five years of knowing what breaks. And the updated toolkit for what’s breaking now.
What People Say
“Gil’s TDD and Clean Code implementation was the most successful I’ve seen in 10 years of development management. The team rated it 4.3 out of 5.” — Uri Shaham, R&D Director · Enterprise Software
“Overall better than any intro workshop I’ve taken. It changed my perception of my role, not a ‘tester.’ More of a quality guardian.” — Senior Developer · Financial Services
“We got all our devs talking about it and going in the right direction. The internet bank team was hugely positive. They’re actually starting to warm up to the whole approach.” — Kristjan Karmo, Engineering Lead · Coop Pank
“The talks weren’t only technical — they covered the human behaviors behind the work, which made everything richer and more useful.” — Vered Halazi-Tregerman, Tech Professional
Questions? Answers.
Looking for hands-on testing craftsmanship instead?
The Strategist builds Quality Architects. Its companion course — The Tactician — builds Testing Craftspeople. Four modules focused on the daily craft: data, assertions, debugging, and testing AI features. Hands-on all the way.
Coming soon. Strategist graduates get first access.