Paul Gerrard

First published 04/11/2009

Hi,

With regards to the ATM accreditation -see attached. The cost of getting accredited in the UK is quite low – UKP 300 I believe. ISTQB UK will reuse the accreditation above.

Fran O'Hara is presenting the course this week. Next week I hope to get feedback from him and I'll update the materials to address the mandatory points in the review and add changes as suggested by Fran.

I've had no word from ISTQB on availability of sample papers as yet. I'll ask again.

I have taken the ATA exam and I thought that around one third of the questions were suspicious. That is, I thought the question did not have an answer or the provided answers were ambiguous or wrong. Interestingly, there are no comments from the client on the exam are there?

If their objective is to pass the exam only, then their objective is not the same as the ISTQB scheme. The training course has been reviewed against the ATA Syllabus which explicitly states a set of learning objectives (in fact they are really training objectives, but that's another debate). The exam is currently a poor exam and does not examine the syllabus content well. It certainly is not focused on the same 'objectives' as the syllabus and training material. If the candidates joined the course thinking the only objective was to pass the exam, then they will not pay attention to the content that is the basis of the exam. I would argue that the best way to pass the exam is to attend to the syllabus. The ‘exam technique’ is very simple – and the same as the Foundation exam. A shortage of test questions should not impair their ability to pass the exam. The exam is based on the SYLLABUS. The course is based on the SYLLABUS.

Here's my comments on their points – in RED.

• The sessions were not oriented to pass the exam. They were general testing lessons� the main objective of the training should be to prepare the assistants for the examination. That is not the intention of the ISTQB scheme. If we offered a course that focused only on passing the exam we would certainly lose our accreditation. Agree that a sample paper is required ((ISTQB to provide). It is extremely hard to prepare course material for the exam without having a sample paper. Although I have taken the exam (and found serious fault with it) I have not got a copy and was not allowed to give feedback. Most of the dedicated time in the training was not usable to pass the exam: The training was more oriented to test management than test analyst, which was the objective. I don’t know if this is true of the material, or the way you presented it. Since the course is meant to be advanced and not basic, the material will be more focused on the tester making choices rather than doing basic exercises. The syllabus dedicates three whole days to test technques – not management specific material. For example: a lot of time dedicated to risk management theory and practice and the specific weigh in the exam for that section was not so high. True. The section on risk based testing is too long and needs cutting down.
• More exercises needed: the training included some exercises but were similar to the foundation level ones. The training provider must be responsible to find and include advanced exercises. The exercises are similar to the Foundation course exercises because the Foundation syllabus is reused. The difficulty of the ATA exercises is slightly higher. However, because the exam presents multiple choice answers, the best technique for obtaining the correct answer may not be how one tests. This is a failure of the exam not the training material. (Until we get a sample paper, how can we give examples of exam questions?) o Examples of exercises: ? For an specific situation: How many test conditions.. using this test technique??? Not sure I understand. Is the comment, “can we have exercises that ask, how many conditions would be derived using a certain technique?” Easily done – just count the conditions in the answer. ? From our experience the exercises included in the exam were similar to the basic one but more complex. Are they saying the ATA exam was like the Foundation exam – but more difficult? That is to be expected. Perhaps we provide some exercises from Foundation materials but make them a little more involved. There are a small number, but I agree we need to provide a lot more.
• The training would include more reference to the foundation level Er not sure what this means. Could or should? Are they asking for more content lifted from Foundation scheme to be included in the course? In fact, much of the reusable material is already in the course (it’s much easier to reuse rather than write new!) Not sure what they are asking here.
• Sample exams needed Agreed!
• A lot of time dedicated in the sessions to theory than can be just self studied by assistants: i.e. Quality attributes This is possible. Perhaps we could extract content from the syllabus and publish this as a pre-read for the course? There are some Q&A in thehandouts already, but more could be added. However, a LOT of the syllabus could be treated this way.
• More practical needed for the following modules: o Defect management Isn’t this covered in the Advanced Test Management syllabus? (They want LESS management don’t they?) o Reviews: in the training we covered theory (types, roles�) but not practical questions like the exam�s We don’t know what the review questions in the exam look like. They are unlikely to be ‘practical’.

The general conclusion is that the training should be pass exam oriented. See my comment above. If this is REALLY what they want – they do not need a training course. They should just memorise the syllabus, since that is what the exam is based on. Some of the comments above, I think are legitimate and we need to add/remove/change content in the course. Some of the ATM material could be reused as it is possibly more compact. (Risk, incidents, reviews). Yes we need more sample questions – agreed! But I think some of the comments above betray a false objective. If we taught an exam-oriented course they would pass the exam but not learn much about testing. This is definitely NOT what the ISTQB scheme is about. However, people like Rex Black are cashing in on this. See here: https://store.rbcs-us.com/index.php?option=com_ixxocart&Itemid=6&p=product&id=16&parent=6 What will you suggest to the client re: getting their people through the exams? I hope some of the text above will help. If you do have specific points (other than above) let me know. I will spend time in the next 2-3 weeks updating the materials.

Tags: #ALF

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