ISTQB EXPERT LEVEL TEST MANAGEMENT STRATEGIC MODULE COURSE

Passed ISTQB Certified Tester Advanced Level Test Manager exam, at least 5 years of practical testing experience, at least 2 years of industry experience in Test Management, fluent English.

General Description

Testing, as an activity by itself, does not provide any value, but rather the value of testing derives from the relevance of the testing activities to the objectives of the product, project, and organizational stakeholders. This intensive, immersive, and extraordinarily interactive course provides test managers with the expert skills needed to establish the objectives of testing (in the test policy) and the means of achieving those objectives (in the test strategy), in a way that relates directly and indirectly to the broader product, project, and organizational objectives. In an intensive series of hands-on, interactive discussions, exercises, and exercise presentations, you’ll develop relevant test policies, strategies, metrics, and more for case study projects. These case studies include projects that follow Agile lifecycles, traditional lifecycles, emerging lifecycles, and blended lifecycles. You’ll apply the ideas to both collocated and distributed teams, and to products ranging from safety-critical to entertainment systems. Your metrics will define key process indicators (KPIs) to quantify the effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction associated with your organizational test policy and strategy.

By the end of this course, through active immersion, hands-on exercises, and intensive engagement with the instructor and fellow attendees through presentation and discussion of exercise solutions, an attendee will have mastered the skills necessary to:

• Define organizational test policy, select and implement appropriate test strategies to meet business objectives and quality goals.
• Unify and merge disparate test approaches and test management, and define and implement efficient and effective organization-wide strategies which consider different lifecycle models and project types.
• Define a tool strategy for the testing organization, including migration, conversion, integration, training, efficiency and process modification.

Created by Rex Black former President of the International Software Testing Qualifications Board (www.istqb.org), former President of the American Software Testing Qualifications Board (www.astqb.org), and lead author of the International Software Testing Qualifications Board Expert Test Manager Syllabus, this course is also ideal for testers and test teams preparing for certification. It covers the International Software Testing Qualifications Board Expert Level Syllabus Test Manager 2011, and will be submitted for accreditation to an ISTQB-recognized National Board in May 2017.

Learning Objectives

Through presentation, discussion, hands-on exercises, and post-exercise solution defense, attendees will learn to:

• Discuss the quality goals of the organization and define a test team’s mission consistent with those goals
• Define, describe and evaluate test objectives, priorities and test goals that might have long term effects on the software, quality, and dependencies (organizational, economical and technical)
• For a given situation, define effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction metrics for the test process, identifying opportunities for improvement
• Analyze a given situation and determine which individual strategies, or blended strategies, are most likely to succeed in that situation
• Analyze a situation in which a given test strategy failed, identifying the likely causes of failure
• For a given situation, create a test strategy document that contains the important elements, enables success factors, and mitigates causes of failure
• Define, describe, evaluate and improve the test policy and strategy, both long and short term for a company, organization and/or a test team, including process and organization of tests, people, tools, systems and techniques
• Summarize the items that must be considered when merging test strategies with a third party organization
• Define the issues that should be considered when dealing with multi-use tools
• Analyze a proposed change to a multi-use tool and assess the impact on the test organization
• Create a plan for rolling out a new multi-use tool considering all phases of the tool lifecycle
• Define how testing fits into an organization’s overall quality management program
• Evaluate and report advantages and disadvantages associated with each lifecycle model in given situations
• Describe the concepts usually found in agile projects which may influence the testing approach
• Compare the various partial project types, discussing the differences between these projects and pure development projects
• For a given test policy, define, evaluate, and report effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction metrics

Course Materials

This course includes the following materials:

Note that material from the Advanced Test Manager syllabus is a prerequisite for the Expert Test Manager modules, and may be covered in the Expert Test Manager exams. Therefore, review material is provided to attendees.

Session Plan

The course runs for three days, with attendees encouraged to take the ISTQB Expert Test Manager Strategic Module exam after completing the course and after further study. Each day is about 360 minutes of class time.

Timing is approximate, depending on attendee interest, discussion, and interaction about the exercises. Each day consists of a mixture of lecture, discussion, exercises, and presentation/discussion of exercise solutions to the group.

The following shows this session plan in relationship to the chapters and sections of the ISTQB Expert Test Manager syllabus.

Day One

• Introduction
• Mission, Policy, and Metrics of Success
• Test Strategies
• Alignment of Test Policy and Test Strategy with the Organization

Day Two

• Merging Test Strategies
• Integrating Tools Across the Organization
• Quality Management and Testing

Day Three

• Test Management Considerations for Lifecycle Models
• Managing Partial Lifecycle Projects
• Effectiveness, Efficiency and Satisfaction Metrics for the Test Objectives