CTAL-TM_Syll2012 ISTQB® Certified Tester Advanced Level - Test Manager [Syllabus 2012] Questions and Answers

Test Tools and Automation

Assume you are the Test Manager in charge of independent testing for avionics applications.

You are in charge of testing for a project to implement three different CSCI (Computer Software Configuration Item):

- a BOOT-X CSCI that must be certified at level B of the DO-178B standard

- a DIAG-X CSCI that must be certified at level C of the DO-178B standard

- a DRIV-X CSCI that must be certified at level A of the DO-178B standard

These are three different software modules written in C language to run on a specific hardware platform.

You have been asked to select a single code coverage tool to perform the mandatory code coverage measurements, in order to meet the structural coverage criteria prescribed by the DO-178B standard. This tool must be qualified as a verification tool under DO-178B.

Since there are significant budget constraints to purchase this tool, you are evaluating an open-source tool that is able to provide different types of code coverage. This tool meets perfectly your technical needs in terms of the programming language and the specific hardware platform (it supports also the specific C-compiler).

The source code of the tool is available.

Your team could easily customize the tool to meet the project needs. This tool is not qualified as a verification tool under the DO-178B.

Which of the following are the three main concerns related to that open-source tool selection?

Number of correct responses: 3

K43 credits (2 credits out of 3 credits correct, 1 credit point)

Test Tools and Automation

After a selection process you have selected a test management tool that is going be introduced in your organization and used by your test team in a pilot project.

You have already identified the member of your test team who will be the administrator of the tool, since he/she has a significant experience with the administration of test management tools and so he/she is able to make effective and efficient up-front decisions about "how" the tool will be used. You have also developed a training plan for the other members of your test team.

In collaboration with the administrator of the tool you have also devised standard ways of managing, storing and maintaining the tool and its assets including backup/restore procedures.

You have also analyzed standard formats supported by the tool (CSV, XLS, XML, etc.) to export, import and archive all the information managed by the tool itself (requirements, test case specifications, test plans etc.) for compliance with the most important test management tools, in order to minimize the impacts of migrating this information to a new tool that could replace the existing one in the future.

Which of the following phases in the lifecycle of the new tool has NOT been adequately considered in this description?

Number of correct responses: 1

K21 credit

Defect Management

Which of the following information would you expect to be the most useful to perform a defect clustering analysis?

Number of correct responses: 1

K21 credit

Test Tools and Automation

In your organization the following tools of the same vendor are currently in use: a requirements management tool, a test management tool and a bug tracking tool.

You are the Test Manager.

You are currently evaluating a test automation tool of the same vendor (to complete the vendor's tool suite) against an interesting open-source test automation tool under the GNU GPL (General Public License).

There are no initial costs associated to that open-source tool.

Which of the following statements associated to the selection of the open-source tool is correct in this scenario?

Number of correct responses: 1

K21 credit

Improving the Testing Process

Which of the following statements about the STEP test process improvement model is true?

Number of correct responses: 1

K21 credit

Improving the Testing Process

Consider the following statements describing the importance of improving the test process:

I. Test process improvement is important because being focused only on the test process it can provide recommendations to improve the test process itself, but it can’t indicate or suggest improvement to areas of the development process

II. Test process improvement is important because it is much more effective than software process improvement to improve the quality of a software system

III. Test process improvement is important because several process improvement models (STEP, TPI Next, TMMi) have been developed over the years

IV. Test process improvement is important because every organization, regardless of the context, should always achieve the maximum level of maturity of testing described in the test improvement models such as TMMi

Which of the following answers is correct?

Number of correct responses: 1

K21 credit

Improving the Testing Process

Which of the following statements about the TMMi test process improvement model is true?

Number of correct responses: 1

K21 credit

Test Management

Assume you are currently working on a project developing a system where functional requirements are very well specified. Unfortunately non-functional requirements do almost not exist.

You are the Test Manager. You have to choose a technique for test selection that allows testing of non-functional characteristics, especially reliability.

Which of the following techniques for test selection do you expect being most useful in this scenario?

Number of correct responses: 1

K21 credit

Test Tools and Automation

Assume you are managing a test automation project for a mission-critical system.

Because vendor provided tools and open source solutions don't meet the needs of this project, you ask your test team to develop a custom automation framework.

Which of the following management issues associated to the development of this custom automation framework is least likely to manage?

Number of correct responses: 1

K21 credit

Which of the following is likely to occur if reviewers do not have an adequate level of technical knowledge? [1]

Defect Management

During the system testing phase a tester from your test team observes a failure in the system under test and he/she decides to create an incident report. The incident report is currently in a “new” state, indicating it needs to be investigated.

Which THREE of the following information items can’t yet be present in the incident report?

Number of correct responses: 3

K32 credits (2 credits out of 3 credits correct, 1 credit point)

Test Tools and Automation

Assume you are a Test Manager involved in system testing of a CRM application for a Pay-TV company. Currently the application is able to support a proper number of users assuring the required responsiveness. Since the business is expected to grow, you have been asked to evaluate the ability of the application to grow to support more users while maintaining the same responsiveness.

Which of the following tools would you expect to be the most useful at performing this evaluation?

Number of correct responses: 1

K21 credit

Testing Process

Consider an information system of a Pay-Tv company based on a SOA architecture.

The integrated system currently consists of three core systems:

- a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system

- a BRM (Billing and Revenue Management) system

- a CAS (Conditional Access System) system

all of them communicating with SOA Middleware.

You have been asked to manage the testing activities for the integration of two additional off-the-shelf systems from two different vendors: a SMS (Short Message Service) server and an IVR (Interactive Voice Response) system.

Assume that there is a high likelihood that the two off-the-shelf systems will be low-quality and that you have a clear proof that the testing performed by the two vendors on their systems has been unsystematic and unprofessional. This obviously leads to higher quality risk for the overall integrated system.

You are the Test Manager of this project. Your main goal is to plan for testing activities to mitigate this risk.

Which of the following answers best describes the test activities (assuming it is possible to perform all of them) you should plan for?

Number of correct responses: 1

K43 credits

Defect Management

Assume you are working on a defect management process to be used by a software organization to track the current status of the defects reports for several projects.

When a defect is found for investigation a defect report is created in “Opened” state that is the unique initial state. The defect report status has also a unique finale state that is the “Closed” state.

The following state transition diagram describes the states of this defect management process:

where only the initial (“Opened”) and final (“Closed”) states are indicated while the remaining states (V, W, X, Y, Z) have yet to be named.

Which of the following assignments would you expect to best complete the defect management process?

Number of correct responses: 1

K32 credits

Defect Management

Consider a defect report and assume that a part of its lifecycle includes the following states:

New: Is the initial state

Working: Means that the developers are addressing the defect in order to produce a fix for the defect

Clarification: Means that the developers need more information from the tester to address the defect and produce a fix for the defect and the tester is working to provide this information to the developers

Verification: Means that a fix for the defect has been produced and the tester is running the adequate tests to verify whether the fix solves the defect

Closed: is the final state

Which of the following answers represents an invalid sequence of states that can’t lead the bug report to the “Closed” state?

Number of correct responses: 1

K21 credit

During the follow-up phase the following conditions are checked:

X1. The code has been completely reviewed

X2. All the identified defects have been correctly fixed and the modified code has been compiled successfully and run through all the static analyzers used by the project without warnings and errors

X3. The modified code is available under the configuration management system with a new version number for the specified CI

If these conditions are fulfilled then the review process terminates.

Which of the following characteristics of a formal review is missing in this description?

Number of correct responses: 1

K21 credit

You are a new Test Manager on a maintenance release for an existing mature product that is expected to be retired in the not too distant

future. The previous release had utilized a performance regression test suite written in an in-house custom tool using the same

programming language as the product itself. This suite will most likely require tweaking to ensure it works with the new version of the

product. While there are several members in the performance testing team, the original author of the performance testing tool has moved on

to another company, and none of the remaining staff have a great deal of familiarity with the performance test scripts used to test this

product.

How would you recommend this scenario be addressed? [3]

You are a Test Manager on a new project. The software that is being created will be used to control the projectors in movie theaters. This is a time critical project because the software must be

released before the Christmas holiday season which has the highest movie attendance of the year.

You have decided to implement a review process for the work products that are a part of this release to save both time and money. In order to expedite the training, you brought in a consultant to

train the participants and moderators in proper review processes. Your team is enthusiastic about participating in the reviews.

The project is in the early planning stages. As the review leader, what is an appropriate activity for you to be doing at this point in the project? [3]

Reviews

You are the Test Manager of a project that adopts a V-model with four formal levels of testing: unit, integration, system and acceptance testing.

On this project reviews have been conducted for each development phase prior to testing, which is to say that reviews of requirements, functional specification, high-level design, low-level design and code have been performed prior to testing.

Assume that no requirements defects have been reported after the release of the product.

Which TWO of the following metrics do you need in order to evaluate the requirements reviews in terms of phase containment effectiveness?

Number of correct responses: 2

K32 credits

Reviews

Which of the following factors could negatively influence a review?

Number of correct responses: 1

K21 credit

The main objectives the senior management team wants to achieve are:

- to reduce the costs associated with dynamic testing

- to use reviews to ensure that the project is on course for success and following the plan

- to use reviews as a well-documented and effective bug-removal activity following a formal process with well-defined roles

- to determine the effectiveness of reviews in terms of phase containment

- to improve phase containment effectiveness

Which of the following answers would you expect to describe the best way to achieve these objectives?

Number of correct responses: 1

K43 credits

Reviews

Consider the following list of statements about audits and management reviews:

I. Audits are usually more effective than management reviews at finding defects

II. Audits and management reviews have the same main goals, the only difference is related to the roles and level of formality

III. A typical outcome of an audit includes observations and recommendations, corrective actions and a pass/fail assessment

IV. An audit is not the appropriate mechanism to use at the code review in order to detect defects prior to dynamic testing

Which of the following statements is true?

Number of correct responses: 1

K21 credit

People Skills – Team Composition

Which of the following would you expect to be most likely an example of a motivating factor for testers?

Number of correct responses: 1

K21 credit

People Skills – Team Composition

Consider the following analysis of testing skills performed on four people: Alex, Robert, John and Mark (all the skills have been rated on an ascending scale: The higher the score, the better the skill):

Which of these people, based on this analysis, would you expect to be most suitable to work specifically as test designer?

Number of correct responses: 1

K43 credits

You are using this skills assessment spreadsheet in order to define a training development plan for your test team.

Your objective is to fill the skill gaps by having at least a team member rated as an expert for each skill identified for the “technical expertise” and “testing skills” sections, and with the ability to train the other team members.

Considering the budget constraints you can send only one person to a training course.

Based only on the given information, which of the following answers would you expect to be the best option to achieve your objective?

Number of correct responses: 1

K43 credits

People Skills – Team Composition

Your test team consists of four members (Mary, Bob, Mark, Dave) with different interpersonal skills.

The following skills assessment spreadsheet shows the characteristics of the team members with respect to a list of interpersonal-skills (for each characteristic only the member with the highest level of that characteristic is indicated and marked with ‘X’):

On the next project a member of your test team will have to perform some routine tasks requiring collaboration with other teams.

Who in your test team would you expect to be most suitable at doing these tasks?

Number of correct responses: 1

K43 credits

People Skills – Team Composition

An agile development team decides to hire a tester who has always worked:

- in independent test teams, reporting the problems found in a defect tracking system

- in safety-critical projects, with a stronger focus on the quality of the product than on time and budget.

This agile team is focused on short-term goals to get the product released on time and within budget.

Which of the following answers would you expect to be most likely true in this scenario?

Number of correct responses: 1

K21 credit