Why We Sequence Pipelines Before Playwright

CI literacy lowers the temperature in every retro. Our CI Pipelines for Testers module lands before Playwright Cross-Browser Lab on purpose: when traces fail, students already know whether the runner, cache, or product caused the red build. In practice, we fork sample workflows with intentional misconfigurations. Learners fix them using minutes budgets as a forcing function — mirroring how platform teams evaluate changes. The narrative is not "DevOps is scary," it is "here is the contract between tests and infrastructure." We also document when to skip reruns. Repeated reruns without classification become organizational debt; the article walks through a short decision tree we use in mentor sessions. Finally, we share a communication template for escalating runner instability without sounding accusatory — tone matters when bridges are busy.