Test automation, taught as judgment.
PlayForge is an online course and practice platform for QA engineers in India who are moving from manual testing into test automation with Playwright.
What we do, and for whom
The problem
Most automation courses teach syntax. The hard part of the job is judgment: deciding what is worth automating, structuring a framework a whole team can share, and reviewing test code an AI agent wrote, which usually looks right and often checks nothing.
Who it is for
QA engineers three to eight years into their careers, mostly manual testers, at Indian IT services and product companies, who need to move into automation without a programming background.
The context
EdTech for software testing. Testing is shifting from manual execution to automation, and AI coding agents now write a growing share of test code. The skill that keeps its value is reviewing and owning that code. That is what PlayForge teaches.
A practitioner, not an instructor
Jatin Thacker
Founder · curriculum and product
Ten years in test automation. An Automation Architect running offshore and nearshore QA teams, currently leading upskilling for a 30-person offshore team, and has trained about twenty engineers in corporate settings. The course is drawn from maintaining thousands of tests in production suites.
LinkedIn profile ↗What is built today
- A written course. 135 lessons in 23 chapters across five acts: JavaScript for testers, Playwright, framework architecture, test judgment, and reviewing AI-written tests.
- An AI tutor on Google Cloud. Built on Gemini through Vertex AI. It answers from the course first, cites the lessons it used, labels anything general as general, and links a practice drill. On a drill it gives a hint, never the answer.
- Practice that fights back. Over 200 exercises (locator drills, fix-the-test, predict-the-outcome) plus quiz banks, run against a practice app built with the traps real applications have.
- A free playground. Write a Playwright locator and see what it matches, with no sign-up: try it.
Stage
Private beta. The course, the practice platform and the AI tutor are live at learnplayforge.com, with an invited beta cohort. Public launch is planned for March 2027. Plans: a free tier, Standard at ₹2,499 a year (introductory), and a small Elite cohort.
Built on Next.js, Supabase and Google Cloud (Vertex AI), hosted on Vercel.
Get in touch
Email jatin@learnplayforge.com or mail.jatint@gmail.com · Toronto, Canada