Level 3 · Ph.D

Advanced Automation

Ph.D syllabus · 56 phases · +1 year

Every unit this programme teaches, in the order it is taught. Headlines only — the material itself opens once you are enrolled.

Dates, price and prerequisites

Phase 0 Foundations & tooling
Phase 1 What "advanced automation" means: rigor over recipes
Phase 2 The shipd delivery system, recapped & instrumented
Phase 3 Research method: reproducible experiments on a pipeline
Phase 4 The algebra of pipelines: determinism, idempotence & purity
Phase 5 Build systems as computation: the build graph & content addressing
Phase 6 Hermetic & reproducible builds, bit-for-bit
Phase 7 Caching theory: correctness, keys & invalidation
Phase 8 Incremental & distributed builds & the critical path
Phase 9 Dependency resolution as constraint solving
Phase 10 Supply-chain integrity I: provenance, SLSA & in-toto
Phase 11 Test theory, revisited: oracles, adequacy & economics
Phase 12 Coverage criteria & their limits
Phase 13 Property-based & metamorphic testing
Phase 14 Mutation testing & the coupling effect
Phase 15 Fuzzing: coverage-guided & structure-aware
Phase 16 Deterministic simulation testing
Phase 17 Distributed-systems testing: linearizability & Jepsen-style checking
Phase 18 Model checking & lightweight formal methods
Phase 19 Performance testing as experiment: queueing theory & percentile math
Phase 20 CI as a distributed system: the integration problem
Phase 21 Merge queues & the not-rocket-science rule
Phase 22 Predictive CI: regression test selection & prioritization
Phase 23 Flaky-test science: detection, quantification & quarantine
Phase 24 Pipeline performance: critical-path analysis at scale
Phase 25 Hermetic CI & remote build execution
Phase 26 Monorepo automation: affected-target graphs at scale
Phase 27 The mathematics of deployment risk
Phase 28 Deployment strategies as control problems
Phase 29 Canary analysis & automated statistical gating
Phase 30 Feature flags & progressive delivery as a control plane
Phase 31 Control theory for delivery & autoscaling
Phase 32 Reproducible & immutable artifacts: OCI internals
Phase 33 Supply-chain integrity II: signing, verification & admission policy
Phase 34 Release engineering: versioning, automated releases & rehearsed rollback
Phase 35 Infrastructure as Code: desired-state convergence, formally
Phase 36 The state problem: drift, locking & convergence guarantees
Phase 37 GitOps & the reconciliation control loop
Phase 38 Policy as Code & admission control
Phase 39 Secrets & identity: short-lived credentials & zero-standing-privilege
Phase 40 Platform engineering & the internal developer platform
Phase 41 Self-service & the abstraction of automation
Phase 42 Observability theory: pillars, cardinality & cost
Phase 43 eBPF & low-overhead instrumentation
Phase 44 SLIs, SLOs & error budgets: the math
Phase 45 Alerting theory: signal, noise & burn-rate windows
Phase 46 Capacity planning & forecasting
Phase 47 Chaos engineering & resilience testing
Phase 48 Auto-remediation & closed-loop control
Phase 49 DevSecOps: security gates without blocking delivery
Phase 50 Pipeline reliability & the meta-pipeline
Phase 51 Measuring delivery performance: DORA, SPACE & the science of it
Phase 52 The research frontier & posing an original contribution
Phase 53 Capstone I: the integrated thesis pipeline
Phase 54 Capstone II: the doctoral publication (PhD conferral gate)
Phase 55 Hardening, postmortem, "What's next" & portal integration