Advanced ISTQB certification: Agile technical tester

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.