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

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

You are a Test Manager working for a software organization where reviews have never been applied. After a meeting with your managers examining a business case for reviews, (including their costs, benefits, and potential issues), the management finally decides to adopt formal reviews for future projects.

You have been given a budget that you have spent to provide training in the review process and to introduce the review process on a pilot project.

On that pilot project the introduction of reviews has been very positive in terms of positive involvement from all the participants. All the reviews applied to different documents have been very effective for their purposes (especially at revealing defects).

Which of the following answers describes an important success factor for the introduction of formal reviews which is missing in this scenario?

Number of correct responses: 1

K43 credits

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

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

People Skills – Team Composition

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

Number of correct responses: 2

K21 credit

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

Your test team has created a custom automation tool that will be used for an upcoming release. Now that the tool has been coded, what

should be the next step? [1]

Which testing metric identifies defect density? [1]

While mining the defect database for patterns of problems in the last release, a Test Manager notices that many of the most damaging failures were caused by defects

injected during the low-level design phase.

Which of the following actions will likely give this project the most effective solution to this problem? [3]

When, at a minimum, should project risks be re-evaluated? [1]

What is a "depth-first" risk-based testing technique? [1]

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

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

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

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

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)

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

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

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

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)

The following are the requirements identified as “critical”:

REQ-SEL-001. The user shall be able to combine all the three products with all the four durations to define an item to purchase

REQ-SEL-002. The user shall be able to add a maximum of six different items to the shopping cart

REQ-PUR-001. The user shall be able to purchase all the items in the shopping cart using a credit voucher

REQ-PUR-002. The user shall be able to purchase all the items in the shopping cart using the available credit already charged on the smartcard

REQ-PUR-003. The user shall be able to purchase all the items in the shopping cart using all the accepted credit cards (Visa, MasterCard and Great Wall Card)

REG-LOGO-001. The user shall be able to logout (by clicking the logout button) from both the “select” and “purchase” pages going back to the “browse” page (anonymous navigation)

Moreover the following quality risk item has been identified as “critical”:

QR-P1. The web customer portal might not be able to provide the expected response time (less than 10 sec) for the purchase transactions under a load of up-to 1000 concurrent users

Test analysis for system testing has just begun and the following test conditions have been identified:

TC-SEL-01. Test the combinations of products and durations to define an item to purchase

TC-SEL-02. Test the maximum number of items, which can be added to the shopping cart

TC-PUR-01. Test the purchase of an item

TC-PUR-02. Test the purchase of an item with the credit charged on the smartcard

Assume that you have used traceability to determine the logical test cases that cover all the requirements and the single risk item identified in that scenario.

Which of the following is a positive logical test that is complete, is correct, and covers the REG-LOGO-001 requirement?

Number of correct responses: 1

K32 credits

You are following a risk-based testing strategy. The test execution time is very limited. Assume that all the product risk items require more or less the same level of test effort.

Which of the following answers describes the best execution schedule in this scenario?

Number of correct responses: 1

K33 credits

Assume that no additional product risks have been identified during the first week of test execution.

Which of the following answers would you expect to best describe the residual risks associated with the identified product risks, at the end of the first week of test execution?

Number of correct responses: 1

K32 credits

The following is the unique “critical” quality risk item that has been identified:

CR-RSK-1. The GUI of the application might accept non-integer values for the input field designed to get the number of bottles from the user

Test analysis for system testing has just begun and the following test conditions have been identified:

TC-SEL-2. Test the selection of the package sizes

TC-SEL-4. Test wrong numbers of bottles for an order

TC-CR-RSK-1. Test the accepted values from the input field designed to get the number of bottles from the user

Assume that you have used traceability to determine the logical test cases that cover all the requirements and the single risk item identified in that scenario.

Which of the following is a positive logical test that is complete and correct, and covers the REQ-SEL-4 requirement?

Number of correct responses: 1

K32 credits

The following are the requirements identified as “critical”:

REQ-SEL-001. The user shall be able to combine all the three products with all the four durations to define an item to purchase

REQ-SEL-002. The user shall be able to add a maximum of six different items to the shopping cart

REQ-PUR-001. The user shall be able to purchase all the items in the shopping cart using a credit voucher

REQ-PUR-002. The user shall be able to purchase all the items in the shopping cart using the available credit already charged on the smartcard

REQ-PUR-003. The user shall be able to purchase all the items in the shopping cart using all the accepted credit cards (Visa, MasterCard and Great Wall Card)

REG-LOGO-001. The user shall be able to logout (by clicking the logout button) from both the “select” and “purchase” pages going back to the “browse” page (anonymous navigation)

Moreover the following quality risk item has been identified as “critical”:

QR-P1. The web customer portal might not be able to provide the expected response time (less than 10 sec) for the purchase transactions under a load of up-to 1000 concurrent users

Test analysis for system testing has just begun and the following test conditions have been identified:

TC-SEL-01. Test the combinations of products and durations to define an item to purchase

TC-SEL-02. Test the maximum number of items, which can be added to the shopping cart

TC-PUR-01. Test the purchase of an item

TC-PUR-02. Test the purchase of an item with the credit charged on the smartcard

What is the MINIMUM number of test conditions that must be added to fulfill both the EXCR1 and EXCR2 exit criteria?

Number of correct responses: 1

K32 credits

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 Management

Which of the following answers describes a factor that may reduce the effort spent when using distributed test teams without negatively affecting system quality?

Number of correct responses: 1

K21 credit

Test Management

You are performing a quality risk analysis for a CSCI (Computer Software Configuration Item) used to implement a CBIT (Continuous Built-In Test) module of a safety-critical system.

During the quality risk analysis you are trying to identify the ways in which failures of the CBIT module can occur, for each of them trying to determine the potential causes and likely effects, and the risk level (calculated as the product of three factors: severity, occurrence and detection).

Which of the following risk analysis techniques are you working with?

Number of correct responses: 1

K21 credit

After the presentation, you are asked to explain the chart.

Assume you have applied a full risk-based testing strategy.

Which of the following answers would you expect to best describe the pie chart?

Number of correct responses: 1

K43 credits

Test Management

In the next two months some new features will be constantly added to new releases of a project you are working on as Test Manager.

You have identified as one of the main project risks, that the requirements specification will still be incomplete when your team starts the test design and implementation phase.

Some requirements will most likely be completed too late to allow a proper test preparation.

You and your test team have already worked on several similar past projects in the same organization.

Which one of the following options would you expect to be the most effective at mitigating this risk?

Number of correct responses: 1

K43 credits