Advanced ISTQB certification: Agile technical tester

Written by Marc Hage Chahine | Mar 7, 2024 5:00:00 AM

Acquiring more Agile skills optimizes project flexibility and efficiency, enabling better adaptation to rapid market changes. What’s more, mastering Agile principles facilitates collaboration, communication and productivity within teams.

Presentation

The ISTQB Agile Technical Tester certification is an advanced ISTQB certification in the same way as the Test Manager and Automation certifications. As such, this certification is complex and requires a good grasp of the basics of testing… and Agile.

It covers the various aspects that a tester working in an Agile team may come up against. These range from requirements and continuous integration to automation and testing approaches.

The main aim of this certification is to offer a range of activities linked to the quality of an Agile product, by proposing best practices to respond to the different contexts we have to face.

Requirements

In order to take the ISTQB Advanced Agile Technical Tester certification, you will need either:

ISTQB foundation certification in version 4.0 or higher
ISTQB foundation certification and ISTQB Agile extension certification.

We also recommend at least 2 years’ experience of testing in an Agile context.

Content

The ISTQB Advanced Agile Technical Tester certification addresses numerous topics around quality within an Agile context. The syllabus contains the following sections:

Requirements Engineering

This section is very comprehensive. It covers various methods for managing requirements in an Agile context, such as the presentation and manipulation of storyboards, story mapping, or the INVEST principles of User Stories.

Testing in Agile

This is the most developed part!
It covers unit testing, TDD, BDD, and ATDD. Following this, testing approaches including experiential-based testing (primarily exploratory testing) are presented with examples to guide testing efforts for each type of test based on the context. Finally, this part concludes with best practices related to code quality (reviews, refactoring…) which can also be useful for testing.

Automation

While not the most important aspect of this certification, Agile cannot be discussed without mentioning test automation. The certification discusses the different activities to automate and then presents approaches such as Data-Driven Testing and Keyword-Driven Testing (KDT) before addressing the principle of automation level to help determine how much to automate.

Deployment and Continuous Delivery

This section is relatively short but interesting. It covers topics of integration, delivery, and continuous deployment, discussing their benefits as well as the constraints associated with them. Different strategies are then presented to help effectively address the needs and constraints. In practice, it is often necessary to apply several of these strategies simultaneously, as indicated in the syllabus, to be effective in the continuous testing approach.

Virtualization

Presentation, interests, and constraints related to service virtualization in testing.

Interest

The ISTQB Advanced Agile Technical Tester certification is very comprehensive. The main advantages of taking this certification are:

You’re bound to learn something! As an Agile tester, you’re usually specialized in technical or functional areas. Certification allows you to discover subjects that you’re not necessarily used to tackling. Likewise, the subjects are fairly advanced, which means that even if you know a subject, you’ll have a few more marbles to work with.
It’s a differentiating marker on your CV! This certification is not widely available. Its rarity and its subject – advanced Agile testing – mean that it can make the difference between 2 CVs, making it easier to get an assignment that interests you.

ISTQB ADVANCED - AGILE TECHNICAL TESTER

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