ISTQB CT-TAE - Certified Tester Test Automation Engineer
Assume that you are the TAE responsible for the correct functioning of a TAS, deployed in a test environment that consists of a few machines running the same version of the operating system. The TAS has been working and stable since its deployment, it has been used to run an automated test suite consisting of many similar automated test. The infrastructure team is planning to update the operating system on these machines by installing a new the service pack for security reasons. Since the vendor of the operating system assurance full backward compatibility, the infrastructure team assurance that there will be no impacts on the functioning of the TAS.
What is the BEST approach to confirm the correct functioning of the TAS in this scenario?
A regression test suite consist of 500 test cases which are all executed manually. The business case for a pilot project is based on the adoption of test automation using a commercial tool that will reduce the execution time by a factor of 90% for 100% of the tests in the regression test suite. The pilot project lasted one month ( as planned) and you are currently its results. At the end of the pilot project, 40% of the regression tests have been automated and their execution time has been reduce by 60%.
Which of the following statements is TRUE in this scenario?
You have investigated a new tool which enables the modelling of the SUT and can then generate test cases either manually or automatically. You have convinced your managers that the best way forward is to conduct a pilot project for this tool. You need to select a project to use for the pilot. You have the choice of the following projects:
Project A: A two-year project that is critical to the business and is currently in the requirement phase. This project is for a new e-commerce web site and is mostly being developed “in-house" although the payment system is being developed and delivered by a 3rd party provider.
Project B: A safety critical application for software to drive and park cars.
Project C: An upgrade to an important HR timesheet tracking application that will be available on a desktop and mobile application. This is a 1-month project developed in-house.
Project D The payment system from project A.
Which project would be BEST for the pilot?
You are working on a TAS for standalone application. The automated tests are developed based on a automation framework that allows interaction with GUI elements using on object orientated API. The GUI elements include menus, buttons, radio buttons, text toolbars and their properties.
Whilst automating a test, you have discovered that the GUI elements of some third party components are not identifiable by the automated tool you are using.
Which of the following is the FIRST step that you take to investigate this issue?
Consider a TAS that uses a keyword-driven framework. The SUT is a web application and there is a large set of keywords available for writing the automated tests that relate to highly specific user actions linked directly to the GUI of the SUT. The automated test written with the keywords are statically analyzed by a custom tool which highlight’s repeated instances of identical sequence of keywords. The waiting mechanism implemented by the TAS for a webpage load is based on a synchronous sampling within a given timeout. The TAS allows checking a webpage load every seconds until a timeout value
Your functional regression test automation suite ran successfully for the first two sprints and no failures were encountered during the runs. The automation suite records the status of each test case as either 'pass' or 'fail' and has excellent recovery capability built in.
For the third sprint, the TAS log reported several test cases with a status of 'fail'. You investigated each test case and found that most failures were due to a defect in one of the keyword scripts, rather than in the SUT. For those where the failure was in the SUT, defect reports were raised but several were returned by the developers asking for more information to enable them to reproduce the problem.
Which additional log items SHOULD you add to the TAS that would BEST improve failure analysis and defect reporting for future sprints?
a) Dynamic measurement information about the SUT.
b) A status of TAS error’, in additional to pass' and 'fail', for each test case.
c) Use of a colour coding scheme so that 'pass’ is in red and fail' is in green.
d) A counter to determine how many times each test case has been executed.
e) System configuration information including software/firmware and operating system versions.
f) A copy of the source code for all Keyword scripts executed.
The GUI of a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) application has been delivered through internet Explorer with proprietary Active X and Java controls. This implementation enables rich client capabilities, but specific commercial automation tools are necessary to automate test cases at GUI of functional test cases. This is to demonstrate whether a small set of the commercial are able to properly recognize actions taken by a tester when interacting with GUI of the CRM application.
Which of the following scripting techniques would be MOST suitable in this scenario?
Which of the following is considered a disadvantage of test automation?
You are testing a major enhancement to an air traffic control user interface. You have use of a sophisticated pre-production test environment, created specifically for large scale automated regression, performance and security testing. The window for regression testing is limited and
must successfully conclude, with no major regressions remaining, before the non-functional testing starts.
You have been using the same version of the TAS for the last few releases, each time completing the automated regression test suite in a single overnight run. However, due to the latest enhancements for the SUT, you believe there is a risk that the test suite may no longer complete
overnight and therefore delay performance and security testing.
Which option would be the BEST and MOST cost-efficient approach to mitigate this risk?
Which of the following metrics could suggest, under certain condition that an automated regression test suite has NOT been updated for new functionalities added to the SUT?