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

1. Which of the following statements about contract testing is TRUE?

A) Contract testing, regardless of the approach chosen (provider-driven or consumer-driven) does not need to rely on the creation of stubs/mocks since it is used to implement integration testing, not unit
/component testing
B) The differences between the two approaches to contract testing stem primarily from which side creates the contract: this creation is done by the provider for the provider-driven approach and by the consumer (s) for the consumer-driven approach
C) Contract testing can be viewed as a specialized form of API testing that can be applied to effectively and efficiently test integration between microservices, but only if they interact with REST APIs
D) Contract testing can be viewed as a specialized form of API testing that can be applied to effectively and efficiently test integration between systems, but only if they interact synchronously

2. Consider a TAS implemented to perform automated testing on native mobile apps at the UI level, where the TAF implements a client-server architecture. The client runs on-premise and allows creation of automated test scripts using TAF libraries to recognize and interact with the app's UI objects. The server runs in the cloud as part of a PaaS service, receiving commands from the client, translating them into actions for the mobile device, and sending the results to the client. The cloud platform hosts several mobile devices dedicated for use by this TAS. The device on which to run test scripts/test suites is specified at run time. You are currently verifying whether the test automation environment and all other TAS/TAF components work correctly. Which of the following activities would you perform to achieve your goal?

A) Check whether all test scripts that will be executed by the TAS as part of a given test suite have expected results
B) Check whether the references to the device on which the given test scripts/test suites will be executed are correctly hard-coded within these test scripts/test suites
C) Check whether the TAF libraries that the test scripts will use to recognize and interact with the app's UI objects (widgets) function as expected
D) Manage the infrastructure that hosts the server, including hardware, software updates, and security patches

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

4. A TAS is used to run on a test environment a suite of automated regression tests, written at the UI level, on different releases of a web app: all executions complete successfully, always providing correct results (i.e., producing neither false positives nor false negatives). The tests, all independent of each other, consist of executable test scripts based on the flow model pattern which has been implemented in a three-layer TAF (test scripts, business logic, core libraries) by expanding the page object model via the facade pattern. Currently the suite takes too long to run, and the test scripts are considered too long in terms of LOC (Lines of Code).
Which of the following recommendations would you provide for improving the TAS (assuming it is possible to perform all of them)?

A) Implement a mechanism to automatically reboot the entire web app in the event of a crash
B) Modify the architecture of the SUT to improve its testability and, if necessary, the TAA accordingly
C) Split the suite into sub-suites and run each of them concurrently on different test environments
D) Modify the TAF so that test scripts are based on the page object model, rather than the flow model pattern

5. 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) Log all the messages directly on the corresponding log files associated with the specific execution to ensure the permanent storage of test execution logs
B) Avoid logging the messages that occur during the specified bursts to minimize any potential performance overhead in test execution
C) 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
D) 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

Solutions: