ISTQB Certified Tester Test Automation Engineer Exam Practice Test

You are implementing a TAS for a system that has been live for over three years, using a hybrid waterfall and agile lifecycle. Live updates are made on a monthly basis.

There is no test team, with developers designing and executing unit and integration tests with some degree of automation and business analysts designing and executing manual tests at the system level. No formal test process exists, although the system has proved relatively stable for most of the time.

Unfortunately, the last two monthly releases were problematic with regression defects found in production. Your priority is the automation of functional regression tests at the system level, the budget for this has been approved by project stakeholders.

The Business Analysts have identified which test cases are most suitable for regression. You must use the organisation's long standing commercial automation tool which has passed a proof of concept in the platform for the system in question.

Which of the following suitability criteria needs the MOST attention for the TAS?

You are working on a government system called ''Making Tax Digital" or MTD for short. This system is being implemented to stop manual human input error and also to reduce fraudulent behaviour from companies when submitting their tax and VAT returns.

The key concept is that registered companies will need to use government recommended 3rd party software for their accounts and book keeping. These 3rd party applications will have a direct interface into the government's main system for transactions and submissions.

You have been using a test execution tool successfully on the project so far. and have implemented a basic ''capture/replay'' approach to scripting.

The management have been encouraged with the automation so far, but want the following objectives to be met:

* Test cases added easily

* Reduction in the amount of scripts and script duplication

* Reduction in maintenance costs

Which scripting technique would be MOST suitable in this scenario in order to meet the objectives?

Your TAS has been running successfully on a Windows/GUI based SUT for some years. The SUT has undergone minimal change over the years to maintain business as usual, deploying six-monthly releases for minor enhancements and bug fixes using a waterfall lifecycle.

The TAS has not changed at all during this period. The current project for the SUT will be using the Scrum methodology to deliver a more modern, competitive, user interface. It is in the release planning stage with an agreed release backlog and set of sprints outlined.

The move from lengthy waterfall releases to shorter sprints has led you to conduct a review of the current TAS to make sure it is robust and fully optimised for the timescale challenges of the new project.

What two steps would be BEST to undertake during the review?

a) Ensure that new automation code is using the same naming conventions as existing code.

b) Perform a full regression run in Sprint 1 to identify what improvements could be made to the TAS for future sprints.

c) Ensure that the TAS is using the latest libraries for the operating system.

d) Review the functions that act upon the controls for the GUI for possible consolidation.

e) Involve the test team to see what ease-of-use improvements they would like to see made to the TAS.

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.

If model-based testing has been selected for the overall test automation approach for a project, how does that influence the layers of the TAA?

A major component of your organisation's Test Automaton Solution (TAS) is a popular open-source third-party capture-replay tool for automated functional testing.

Which two of the following must the Test Automation Engineer (TAE) ensure happens for this TAS?

a) The third party tool is placed under configuration management control.

b) The annual support and maintenance costs are agreed with the tool's vendor.

c) It is Important to obtain information about updates and new versions of the tool so that the third party tool is kept up to date.

d) Ensure that the TAS test scripts are integrated into the tool's framework.

e) Ensure that no changes are made to the tool, because modifications are not allowed for third party products.

You are working as a TAE for a company who have been using a web test execution tool for a number of years. The tool has been used successfully on ten web applications in the past.

The company are developing a new web application which has a friendly User Interface, but the developers have used an object throughout the application which the tool is unable to recognise. As a result, you have no way of capturing the object or verifying the contents using the automation tool.

What is the first thing you should do about this problem?