First, define your goal. Are you automating builds, running tests, or deploying? Sora's value depends on your pipeline stage.
Start with their docs. Skip the marketing. Look for:
* Quickstart guide for your platform (GitHub, GitLab, etc.)
* Configuration syntax examples
* Their API spec if you need custom steps
Basic workflow structure usually looks like this:
```yaml
# Example Sora config snippet
workflow:
- name: Build and Test
steps:
- task: build@v1
image: node:18
- task: test@v1
parallel: true
```
Key things to test immediately:
1. **Caching:** Check if their cache steps actually speed up your builds.
2. **Artifact handling:** How do you pass build outputs between jobs? Is it seamless or brittle?
3. **Failure modes:** Intentionally break a step. See how Sora reports errors and recovers.
Ignore any "magic" features. Focus on reliability. Can you debug a stuck pipeline at 3 AM? If not, reconsider.
Pitfall: Their free tier likely has concurrency limits. That will bottleneck your parallel testing. Check that first.