ISQI ISTQB Certified Tester Advanced Level - Test Automation Engineering CTAL-TAE (Syllabus v2.0) Sample Questions:

1. An API's response to a request made to the corresponding endpoint should return some specific data about a payment transaction in JSON format. In particular, your goal is to write the test automation code, keeping it as short as possible, aimed at determining whether that response includes certain properties (transaction_id, amount, status, timestamp) with the data types and formats expected. Assuming that the TAF provides all the necessary support to validate the specified API response, how would you BEST achieve your goal?

A) Write a single assertion for each property to check whether the data types and formats for that property are as expected in the actual response
B) Write custom code that parses the actual response data and checks whether the extracted properties, data types, and formats are as expected
C) Use an artificial intelligence algorithm based on machine learning and image recognition to implement a self-healing capability
D) Specify the schema for the expected response data (properties, data types, and formats) and validate the actual response data against this schema

2. Automated tests run by a TAS on a SUT can be subject to sudden bursts of messages to log during their execution. All log messages that occur during execution must be permanently stored in the corresponding test execution logs by the TAS for later analysis. If logging is not performed correctly, these bursts can reduce the execution speed of these automated tests, causing them to produce unreliable results. Which of the following solutions would you expect to be MOST useful to address this issue for TAS logging?

A) Use a Network Time Protocol (NTP) server to ensure that the clocks of the machines running TAS and SUT are synchronized with a common time source
B) Log all the messages directly on the corresponding log files associated with the specific execution to ensure the permanent storage of test execution logs
C) Avoid logging the messages that occur during the specified bursts to minimize any potential performance overhead in test execution
D) Log all the messages in memory using a circular buffer and periodically flush the buffer to the corresponding log files associated with the specific execution

3. A release candidate of a SUT, after being fully integrated with all other necessary systems, has successfully passed all required functional tests (90% were automated tests and 10% were manual tests). Now, it is necessary to perform reliability tests aimed at evaluating whether, under certain conditions, that release will be able to guarantee an MTBF (Mean Time Between Failures) in the production environment higher than a certain threshold (expressed in CPU time). Which of the following test environments is BEST suited to perform these reliability tests?

A) Build environment
B) Preproduction environment
C) Local development environment
D) Integration environment

4. An automated test case that should always pass sometimes passes and sometimes fails intermittently (non- deterministic behavior) when executed in the same test environment, even if no code (i.e., SUT code or the test automation code) has been changed. Which of the following statements about the root cause of this non- deterministic behavior is TRUE?

A) The specified root cause is a race condition that can be identified by also analyzing the log files of the test case, the SUT, and the TAF
B) Determining the specified root cause may require, in addition to the TAE, the support of others such as developers and system engineers
C) Determining the specified root cause is certainly easier than if the automated test always fails (deterministic behavior)
D) The specified root cause must be in the instability of the test environment, since no code has been changed

5. Automated tests at the UI level for a web app adopt an asynchronous waiting mechanism that allows them to synchronize test steps with the app, so that they are executed correctly and at the right time, only when the app is ready and has processed the previous step: this is done when there are no timeouts or pending asynchronous requests. In this way, the tests automatically synchronize with the app's web pages. The same initialization tasks to set test preconditions are implemented as test steps for all tests. Regarding the pre- processing (Setup) features defined at the test suite level, the TAS provides both a Suite Setup (which runs exactly once when the suite starts) and a Test Setup (which runs at the start of each test case in the suite).
Which of the following recommendations would you provide for improving the TAS (assuming it is possible to perform all of them)?

A) Adopt a manual synchronization with the app's web pages using dynamic waits via polling instead of the current automatic synchronization
B) Implement the initialization tasks aimed at setting the preconditions of the tests within the Test Setup feature at the test suite level
C) Implement the initialization tasks aimed at setting the preconditions of the tests within the Suite Setup feature at the test suite level
D) Adopt a manual synchronization with the app's web pages using hard-coded waits instead of the current automatic synchronization

Solutions: