ISTQB® Agile Tester Foundation Certification

Explore the agile manifesto and its four value statements, prioritizing individuals and interactions, working software, customer collaboration, and responsiveness to change, to guide agile software development.

Release working software early and frequently to satisfy customers and deliver real value. Embrace changes with backlog prioritization and daily face-to-face collaboration between business and development teams.

Emphasizes delivering working software as the measure of progress, maintaining a sustainable pace, and focusing on simplicity, technical excellence, and self-organizing teams through regular retrospectives.

The whole team approach unites small, co-located, cross-functional teams with mutual accountability, a product owner's input, and shared testing to deliver high-quality software.

Learn how agile uses early and frequent feedback from the end customer and product owner through short iterations to enable rapid learning, fail-fast decisions, and high-value feature delivery.

Discover how extreme programming (xp) embodies agile values: communication, simplicity, feedback, courage, and respect, and examine its thirteen practices, including sit together, pair programming, and continuous integration.

Explore Scrum, an agile framework with roles (Scrum Master, Product Owner, Development Team), sprints, timeboxing, and backlogs that yield a potentially shippable product increment.

Kanban visualizes and optimizes the flow of work using work-in-progress limits and a pull system on a Kanban board, reducing lead time and enabling item-by-item releases.

Collaborative user story creation teaches writing valuable, testable stories via open-ended questions, acceptance criteria, and INVEST, following the 3C concepts of card, conversation, and confirmation for agile backlog alignment.

Retrospectives in agile development act as a quality assurance activity, reviewing what worked, identifying improvements, and embedding changes to boost test effectiveness, productivity, quality, and team capacity in each iteration.

Streamline software delivery by continuously integrating code changes through automated builds, tests, and deployments, with rapid feedback and early defect detection to ensure a reliable product increment.

Velocity measures a team's capacity per iteration by completed user stories, using points or other units. It helps predict what we will accomplish and when the release will be done.

Release planning in agile projects sets releases and iterations, refines the product backlog, assesses risks, and plans testing and development to deliver valuable increments.

Contrast agile and traditional lifecycles to integrate testing with development across short iterations. Leverage risk-based testing, automation, pairing, and coaching to adapt practices and deliver working software with fast feedback.

Explore agile project work products across business-oriented (user stories, acceptance criteria), development (code, unit tests), and test (manual and automated tests, test plans) categories, with lightweight documentation and working software.

Explains test levels, including unit, integration, system, and user acceptance testing, with overlapping development activities and iterative feature verification and feature validation testing, plus regression testing.

Automated testing with configuration management and continuous integration validates builds across operating systems and hardware configurations, using unit and functional tests to detect build failures quickly and reduce regression risk.

Examine organizational options for independent testing in agile contexts, including fully independent teams, ad hoc on-demand testers, and long-term integrated teams with automation, non-functional testing, and system integration.

Explore burn down and burn up charts in agile projects to track remaining effort, velocity and delivered work, account for scope changes, and update progress at end of each iteration.

Communicate agile test status and product quality by tracking accepted software at iteration end with task boards, burn down charts, and stand-up updates.

Automate manual and automated test cases at all levels to manage regression risk as agile iterations add features, and keep tests in a configuration management tool for version control.

Agile tester skills blend collaboration with stakeholders and team members with traditional testing, test automation, TDD, ATDD, and white-box and black-box methods, while emphasizing proactive communication and continuous skills growth.

Generate feedback on test status, progress, product quality, and process quality, and define test strategy, coverage, tools, environments, data, defect reporting, coaching, and planning for releases and iterations.

Explore how test-driven development, acceptance test-driven development, and behavior-driven development enable early testing in agile projects, guiding tests at the right time and level across unit, integration, and system tests.

Explore acceptance test-driven development and behavior-driven development, focusing on defining acceptance criteria early, collaborating across stakeholders, and using given/when/then scenarios to drive automated, regression-ready tests.

Explore the test pyramid, prioritizing many unit and integration tests at the base automated with API-based tools, while system and acceptance tests use GUI tools to eliminate defects early.

Explore testing quadrants, levels, and types within agile development, detailing business-facing and technology-facing tests, and how unit, functional, exploratory, and performance tests fit CI pipelines.

Define the tester's role in agile lifecycles, with Scrum as an example, emphasizing cross-functional, co-located, collaborative, committed, and transparent teams that plan, test, and report together.

Assess quality risks and estimate test effort in agile projects by analyzing likelihood and impact, prioritizing tests, and applying risk-based test design and execution.

Learn to estimate testing effort with planning poker and sizing scales like Fibonacci, to produce story points or effort days while minimizing influence and achieving consensus.

Explore how acceptance criteria and adequate coverage guide agile testing, using backlog user stories, non-functional requirements, and a test basis to verify functional behavior and quality attributes.

Define the done criteria for unit, integration, system testing, and user stories to ensure complete, tested features with clear acceptance criteria, and no unresolved major defects or known technical debt.

Apply acceptance test-driven development by creating tests before coding in a workshop with developers, testers, and business representatives. Express tests in natural language, covering positive, negative, and non-functional attributes.

Agile testers work with developers using user stories and acceptance criteria, applying black box techniques like equivalence partitioning, boundary value analysis, and state transition testing to cover non-functional requirements.

Explore how exploratory testing complements agile projects by blending with risk-based, requirements-based, and model-based testing in a reactive, time-boxed approach guided by test charters and session-based management.

Explore agile tools for task management and tracking, including application lifecycle management, task boards, burn down charts, user stories, and metrics dashboards for real-time status visibility and collaboration.

Explore how wikis, instant messaging, and desktop sharing support agile information sharing by building an online knowledge base and enabling real-time communication. Complement, not replace, face-to-face collaboration.

Learn how continuous integration and build distribution tools enable daily builds and deployments in agile teams, delivering quick feedback on code quality and build visibility while reducing manual errors.

Explore configuration management tools on agile teams, storing source code, automated and manual tests in one repository for traceability and rapid changes, comparing centralized and distributed version control.

Explore mind maps for rapid test design, and the role of test case management, data preparation and generation, and automated execution tools in agile and exploratory testing.

Discover cloud computing and virtualization tools that let a single server host multiple virtual machines for faster development and testing, using snapshots for provisioning and sharing faults with developers.