Test Management

Consider the following test strategies:

I. Consultative test strategy

II. Reactive test strategy

III. Analytical test strategy

IV. Process-compliant test strategy

Consider also the following examples of test activities:

1. Prioritize the test cases, based on the results of a FMEA analysis, to ensure early coverage of the most important areas and discovery of the most important defects during test execution

2. Execute usability testing driven by the guidance of a sample of users (external to the test team)

3. Perform exploratory testing sessions throughout the system test phase

4. On an Agile project, execute tests that cover the test conditions identified for each user story of a feature planned for an iteration

Which of the following correctly matches each test strategy with an appropriate example?

Number of correct responses: 1

K21 credit

Test Management

Based on the historical data of 5 past and similar projects, you have calculated these average numbers of defects detected in system testing:

- for each 10000 LOC (lines of code), 200 defects

- for each person-month of development team effort, 49 defects

You want to use this information to perform estimation for a new project.

The project manager tells you that he/she has estimated 20000 new LOC for this new project.

Four developers work for four months on this project before system testing.

During system testing, 797 defects are discovered.

Assume that the system test of this new project is using the same amount of work as spent in the past projects.

Based on this information only, which of the following statement is certainly true about this project?

Number of correct responses: 1

K33 credits

Which of the following statements represents the most effective contribution of the stakeholders to the completion of the failure mode analysis table?

Number of correct responses: 1

K43 credits

Test Management

Consider an agile team adopting Extreme Programming (XP) with five developers and one tester without any coding experience.

To which of the following activities would you expect the tester will contribute most?

Number of correct responses: 1

K21 credit

Test Management

Assume you are currently working on a project developing a system where functional requirements are very well specified. Unfortunately non-functional requirements do almost not exist.

You are the Test Manager. You have to choose a technique for test selection that allows testing of non-functional characteristics, especially reliability.

Which of the following techniques for test selection do you expect being most useful in this scenario?

Number of correct responses: 1

K21 credit

Reviews

You are the Test Manager of a project that adopts a V-model with four formal levels of testing: unit, integration, system and acceptance testing.

On this project reviews have been conducted for each development phase prior to testing, which is to say that reviews of requirements, functional specification, high-level design, low-level design and code have been performed prior to testing.

Assume that no requirements defects have been reported after the release of the product.

Which TWO of the following metrics do you need in order to evaluate the requirements reviews in terms of phase containment effectiveness?

Number of correct responses: 2

K32 credits

During the follow-up phase the following conditions are checked:

X1. The code has been completely reviewed

X2. All the identified defects have been correctly fixed and the modified code has been compiled successfully and run through all the static analyzers used by the project without warnings and errors

X3. The modified code is available under the configuration management system with a new version number for the specified CI

If these conditions are fulfilled then the review process terminates.

Which of the following characteristics of a formal review is missing in this description?

Number of correct responses: 1

K21 credit

Reviews

Which of the following factors could negatively influence a review?

Number of correct responses: 1

K21 credit

Reviews

Consider the following list of statements about audits and management reviews:

I. Audits are usually more effective than management reviews at finding defects

II. Audits and management reviews have the same main goals, the only difference is related to the roles and level of formality

III. A typical outcome of an audit includes observations and recommendations, corrective actions and a pass/fail assessment

IV. An audit is not the appropriate mechanism to use at the code review in order to detect defects prior to dynamic testing

Which of the following statements is true?

Number of correct responses: 1

K21 credit

Reviews

You are a Test Manager working for a software organization where reviews have never been applied. After a meeting with your managers examining a business case for reviews, (including their costs, benefits, and potential issues), the management finally decides to adopt formal reviews for future projects.

You have been given a budget that you have spent to provide training in the review process and to introduce the review process on a pilot project.

On that pilot project the introduction of reviews has been very positive in terms of positive involvement from all the participants. All the reviews applied to different documents have been very effective for their purposes (especially at revealing defects).

Which of the following answers describes an important success factor for the introduction of formal reviews which is missing in this scenario?

Number of correct responses: 1

K43 credits

People Skills – Team Composition

Assume you are managing the system testing execution phase of a project.

The system test execution period for that project is scheduled for eighteen weeks and the release date is scheduled at the end of system testing.

During the sixth week of system test execution, at the staff meeting, the project manager informs you that the project deadlines are changed and the release date that is only three weeks ahead.

This new release will not allow the completion of the system tests. Suppose also that you have followed a risk-driven test approach for this project.

Which of the following statements represents the worst way to lead your test team in the next three weeks?

Number of correct responses: 1

K21 credit

You are using this skills assessment spreadsheet in order to define a training development plan for your test team.

Your objective is to fill the skill gaps by having at least a team member rated as an expert for each skill identified for the “technical expertise” and “testing skills” sections, and with the ability to train the other team members.

Considering the budget constraints you can send only one person to a training course.

Based only on the given information, which of the following answers would you expect to be the best option to achieve your objective?

Number of correct responses: 1

K43 credits

People Skills – Team Composition

Consider the following analysis of testing skills performed on four people: Alex, Robert, John and Mark (all the skills have been rated on an ascending scale: The higher the score, the better the skill):

Which of these people, based on this analysis, would you expect to be most suitable to work specifically as test designer?

Number of correct responses: 1

K43 credits

People Skills – Team Composition

Your test team consists of four members (Mary, Bob, Mark, Dave) with different interpersonal skills.

The following skills assessment spreadsheet shows the characteristics of the team members with respect to a list of interpersonal-skills (for each characteristic only the member with the highest level of that characteristic is indicated and marked with ‘X’):

On the next project a member of your test team will have to perform some routine tasks requiring collaboration with other teams.

Who in your test team would you expect to be most suitable at doing these tasks?

Number of correct responses: 1

K43 credits

People Skills – Team Composition

Which of the following would you expect to be most likely an example of a motivating factor for testers?

Number of correct responses: 1

K21 credit

Improving the Testing Process

Consider the following statements describing the importance of improving the test process:

I. Test process improvement is important because being focused only on the test process it can provide recommendations to improve the test process itself, but it can’t indicate or suggest improvement to areas of the development process

II. Test process improvement is important because it is much more effective than software process improvement to improve the quality of a software system

III. Test process improvement is important because several process improvement models (STEP, TPI Next, TMMi) have been developed over the years

IV. Test process improvement is important because every organization, regardless of the context, should always achieve the maximum level of maturity of testing described in the test improvement models such as TMMi

Which of the following answers is correct?

Number of correct responses: 1

K21 credit

Improving the Testing Process

Which of the following statements about the TMMi test process improvement model is true?

Number of correct responses: 1

K21 credit

Improving the Testing Process

Which of the following statements about the STEP test process improvement model is true?

Number of correct responses: 1

K21 credit

The following are the requirements identified as “critical”:

REQ-SEL-001. The user shall be able to combine all the three products with all the four durations to define an item to purchase

REQ-SEL-002. The user shall be able to add a maximum of six different items to the shopping cart

REQ-PUR-001. The user shall be able to purchase all the items in the shopping cart using a credit voucher

REQ-PUR-002. The user shall be able to purchase all the items in the shopping cart using the available credit already charged on the smartcard

REQ-PUR-003. The user shall be able to purchase all the items in the shopping cart using all the accepted credit cards (Visa, MasterCard and Great Wall Card)

REG-LOGO-001. The user shall be able to logout (by clicking the logout button) from both the “select” and “purchase” pages going back to the “browse” page (anonymous navigation)

Moreover the following quality risk item has been identified as “critical”:

QR-P1. The web customer portal might not be able to provide the expected response time (less than 10 sec) for the purchase transactions under a load of up-to 1000 concurrent users

Test analysis for system testing has just begun and the following test conditions have been identified:

TC-SEL-01. Test the combinations of products and durations to define an item to purchase

TC-SEL-02. Test the maximum number of items, which can be added to the shopping cart

TC-PUR-01. Test the purchase of an item

TC-PUR-02. Test the purchase of an item with the credit charged on the smartcard

What is the MINIMUM number of test conditions that must be added to fulfill both the EXCR1 and EXCR2 exit criteria?

Number of correct responses: 1

K32 credits

The following is the unique “critical” quality risk item that has been identified:

CR-RSK-1. The GUI of the application might accept non-integer values for the input field designed to get the number of bottles from the user

Test analysis for system testing has just begun and the following test conditions have been identified:

TC-SEL-2. Test the selection of the package sizes

TC-SEL-4. Test wrong numbers of bottles for an order

TC-CR-RSK-1. Test the accepted values from the input field designed to get the number of bottles from the user

Assume that you have used traceability to determine the logical test cases that cover all the requirements and the single risk item identified in that scenario.

Which of the following is a positive logical test that is complete and correct, and covers the REQ-SEL-4 requirement?

Number of correct responses: 1

K32 credits

You are a new Test Manager on a maintenance release for an existing mature product that is expected to be retired in the not too distant

future. The previous release had utilized a performance regression test suite written in an in-house custom tool using the same

programming language as the product itself. This suite will most likely require tweaking to ensure it works with the new version of the

product. While there are several members in the performance testing team, the original author of the performance testing tool has moved on

to another company, and none of the remaining staff have a great deal of familiarity with the performance test scripts used to test this

product.

How would you recommend this scenario be addressed? [3]

Which of the following statements is true regarding Fault Tree Analysis? [1]

What is a "depth-first" risk-based testing technique? [1]

Your Project Manager has challenged you to come up with a process improvement strategy using the IDEAL model.

Which step within the process defines the success criteria? [2]

You have been carefully monitoring the progress of testing for your project. You have been using the established traceability to verify that the requirements and test

conditions are being adequately addressed. The test team is proceeding well in their test case execution and you can see that you are achieving about 80% coverage of

the test conditions per the traceability mapping in your test management system. You have seen a number of defects being logged against test conditions that are failing,

but you do not see a mapping of the test cases to those conditions.

What is likely to be occurring in the testing area that is causing the traceability to break down? [2]

Test Tools and Automation

In your organization the following tools of the same vendor are currently in use: a requirements management tool, a test management tool and a bug tracking tool.

You are the Test Manager.

You are currently evaluating a test automation tool of the same vendor (to complete the vendor's tool suite) against an interesting open-source test automation tool under the GNU GPL (General Public License).

There are no initial costs associated to that open-source tool.

Which of the following statements associated to the selection of the open-source tool is correct in this scenario?

Number of correct responses: 1

K21 credit

Test Tools and Automation

Assume you are managing a test automation project for a mission-critical system.

Because vendor provided tools and open source solutions don't meet the needs of this project, you ask your test team to develop a custom automation framework.

Which of the following management issues associated to the development of this custom automation framework is least likely to manage?

Number of correct responses: 1

K21 credit

Test Tools and Automation

Assume you are the Test Manager in charge of independent testing for avionics applications.

You are in charge of testing for a project to implement three different CSCI (Computer Software Configuration Item):

- a BOOT-X CSCI that must be certified at level B of the DO-178B standard

- a DIAG-X CSCI that must be certified at level C of the DO-178B standard

- a DRIV-X CSCI that must be certified at level A of the DO-178B standard

These are three different software modules written in C language to run on a specific hardware platform.

You have been asked to select a single code coverage tool to perform the mandatory code coverage measurements, in order to meet the structural coverage criteria prescribed by the DO-178B standard. This tool must be qualified as a verification tool under DO-178B.

Since there are significant budget constraints to purchase this tool, you are evaluating an open-source tool that is able to provide different types of code coverage. This tool meets perfectly your technical needs in terms of the programming language and the specific hardware platform (it supports also the specific C-compiler).

The source code of the tool is available.

Your team could easily customize the tool to meet the project needs. This tool is not qualified as a verification tool under the DO-178B.

Which of the following are the three main concerns related to that open-source tool selection?

Number of correct responses: 3

K43 credits (2 credits out of 3 credits correct, 1 credit point)

Test Tools and Automation

After a selection process you have selected a test management tool that is going be introduced in your organization and used by your test team in a pilot project.

You have already identified the member of your test team who will be the administrator of the tool, since he/she has a significant experience with the administration of test management tools and so he/she is able to make effective and efficient up-front decisions about "how" the tool will be used. You have also developed a training plan for the other members of your test team.

In collaboration with the administrator of the tool you have also devised standard ways of managing, storing and maintaining the tool and its assets including backup/restore procedures.

You have also analyzed standard formats supported by the tool (CSV, XLS, XML, etc.) to export, import and archive all the information managed by the tool itself (requirements, test case specifications, test plans etc.) for compliance with the most important test management tools, in order to minimize the impacts of migrating this information to a new tool that could replace the existing one in the future.

Which of the following phases in the lifecycle of the new tool has NOT been adequately considered in this description?

Number of correct responses: 1

K21 credit

Test Tools and Automation

Assume you are a Test Manager involved in system testing of a CRM application for a Pay-TV company. Currently the application is able to support a proper number of users assuring the required responsiveness. Since the business is expected to grow, you have been asked to evaluate the ability of the application to grow to support more users while maintaining the same responsiveness.

Which of the following tools would you expect to be the most useful at performing this evaluation?

Number of correct responses: 1

K21 credit

Defect Management

During the system testing phase a tester from your test team observes a failure in the system under test and he/she decides to create an incident report. The incident report is currently in a “new” state, indicating it needs to be investigated.

Which THREE of the following information items can’t yet be present in the incident report?

Number of correct responses: 3

K32 credits (2 credits out of 3 credits correct, 1 credit point)

Defect Management

Which of the following information would you expect to be the most useful to perform a defect clustering analysis?

Number of correct responses: 1

K21 credit

Defect Management

Consider a defect report and assume that a part of its lifecycle includes the following states:

New: Is the initial state

Working: Means that the developers are addressing the defect in order to produce a fix for the defect

Clarification: Means that the developers need more information from the tester to address the defect and produce a fix for the defect and the tester is working to provide this information to the developers

Verification: Means that a fix for the defect has been produced and the tester is running the adequate tests to verify whether the fix solves the defect

Closed: is the final state

Which of the following answers represents an invalid sequence of states that can’t lead the bug report to the “Closed” state?

Number of correct responses: 1

K21 credit

Defect Management

Assume you are working on a defect management process to be used by a software organization to track the current status of the defects reports for several projects.

When a defect is found for investigation a defect report is created in “Opened” state that is the unique initial state. The defect report status has also a unique finale state that is the “Closed” state.

The following state transition diagram describes the states of this defect management process:

where only the initial (“Opened”) and final (“Closed”) states are indicated while the remaining states (V, W, X, Y, Z) have yet to be named.

Which of the following assignments would you expect to best complete the defect management process?

Number of correct responses: 1

K32 credits