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

1. In a first possible implementation, the automated test scripts within a suite locate and interact with elements of a web UI indirectly through the browsers using browser-specific drivers and APIs, provided by an automated test tool used as part of the TAS. In an alternative implementation, these test scripts locate and interact with elements of the same web UI directly at the HTML level by accessing the DOM (Document Object Model) and internal JavaScript code. The first possible implementation:

A) Has a higher level of intrusion than the alternative implementation, and therefore its test scripts are less likely to produce false positives
B) Has the same level of intrusion as the alternative implementation, and therefore the risk of test scripts producing false positives is the same in both cases
C) Has a lower level of intrusion than the alternative implementation, and therefore its test scripts are less likely to produce false positives
D) Has a lower level of intrusion than the alternative implementation, and therefore its test scripts are more likely to produce false positives

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

3. (Which of the following statements about how test automation is applied across different software development lifecycle models is TRUE?)

A) Unlike Agile software development, where automated unit tests are written by developers, often in a test-first fashion, in a V-model, automated unit tests are written by testers as part of unit testing
B) In a Waterfall model, automated tests are usually executed only during the last phase of the development lifecycle, but their implementation occurs in the early stages
C) In Agile software development, regardless of context (e.g., type of application to be developed, tools available), test automation must be based on the test automation distribution known as the test pyramid model
D) In Agile software development, automated regression test suites sometimes grow so large that they can become difficult to maintain, and thus, it becomes crucial to invest in test automation at multiple test levels

4. You are currently conducting a Proof of Concept (PoC) aimed at selecting a tool that will be used for the development of a TAS. This TAS will exclusively be used by one team within your organization to implement automated UI-level test scripts for two web apps. The two tools selected for the PoC use JavaScript
/TypeScript to implement the automated test scripts and offer capture and playback capabilities. Three test cases for each of the two web apps were selected to be automated during the PoC. The PoC will compare these two tools in terms of their effectiveness in recognizing and interacting with UI widgets exercised by the test cases, to quickly determine whether test automation is possible and which tool is better. Which of the following TAFs is BEST suited for conducting the PoC?

A) A three-layer TAF (test scripts, business logic, core libraries)
B) A one-layer TAF (test scripts)
C) A two-layer TAF (test scripts, test libraries)
D) A layered TAF with more than three layers

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

Solutions: