CTAL-TM_Syll2012 Sample Questions Answers

Which testing metric identifies defect density? [1]

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

You are a Test Manager on a new project. The software that is being created will be used to control the projectors in movie theaters. This is a time critical project because the software must be released before the Christmas holiday season which has the highest movie attendance of the year.

You have decided to implement a review process for the work products that are a part of this release to save both time and money. In order to expedite the training, you brought in a consultant to

train the participants and moderators in proper review processes. Your team is enthusiastic about participating in the reviews.

Your manager is questioning the money you have spent on this training effort. He wants to know how you intend to justify the expense when you present your numbers at the annual budget

meeting in February.

What would be a reasonable way for you to justify the cost of the training and the reviews when you present your information at the budget meeting? [3]

Which of the following is likely to occur if reviewers do not have an adequate level of technical knowledge? [1]

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

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

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

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

Test Management

You are the Test Manager on a project following an iterative life-cycle model. The project should consist of nine iterations of one month duration each. It is planned to develop the most important features to have a stable core of the application in the first three iterations and to add the additional features in the last six iterations.

At the beginning of the first iteration, only a draft version of the requirements specification document for the core features is available. Assume that during each of the first three iterations, the chosen features are fully completed and unit tested.

Which of the following statements is true in this context?

Number of correct responses: 1

K43 credits

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

Test Management

In the test strategy document your organization declares:

- to adopt a V-model development lifecycle, with three formal levels of testing: unit, integration and system testing

- to use a blended risk-based and regression-averse testing strategy for each level of testing

The following is an excerpt of the “approach” section for the system test plan document of a new project:

“Testing will only use manual tests. Due to the short period of time for test execution, the following activities will be performed in parallel with test execution: Test planning, test analysis and test design.

Basic metrics will be taken for test effort (i.e. person-hours), test cases executed (passed/failed), and incidents (no more metrics, such as code coverage, will be collected).”

In the system test plan, no deviations from the test strategy are described.

Based only on the given information, which of the following statements is true?

Number of correct responses: 1

K43 credits

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

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

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

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 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

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

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

People Skills – Team Composition

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

Number of correct responses: 2

K21 credit

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

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

People Skills – Team Composition

An agile development team decides to hire a tester who has always worked:

- in independent test teams, reporting the problems found in a defect tracking system

- in safety-critical projects, with a stronger focus on the quality of the product than on time and budget.

This agile team is focused on short-term goals to get the product released on time and within budget.

Which of the following answers would you expect to be most likely true in this scenario?

Number of correct responses: 1

K21 credit

Testing Process

Consider an information system of a Pay-Tv company based on a SOA architecture.

The integrated system currently consists of three core systems:

- a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system

- a BRM (Billing and Revenue Management) system

- a CAS (Conditional Access System) system

all of them communicating with SOA Middleware.

You have been asked to manage the testing activities for the integration of two additional off-the-shelf systems from two different vendors: a SMS (Short Message Service) server and an IVR (Interactive Voice Response) system.

Assume that there is a high likelihood that the two off-the-shelf systems will be low-quality and that you have a clear proof that the testing performed by the two vendors on their systems has been unsystematic and unprofessional. This obviously leads to higher quality risk for the overall integrated system.

You are the Test Manager of this project. Your main goal is to plan for testing activities to mitigate this risk.

Which of the following answers best describes the test activities (assuming it is possible to perform all of them) you should plan for?

Number of correct responses: 1

K43 credits

Assume that the following test cases have been executed at the end of the first week of test execution: TC-001, TC-002 and TC-007. All these tests are ‘passes’.

What is the MINIMUM number of the remaining test cases that must be successfully executed to fulfill the EX1 exit criteria?

Number of correct responses: 1

K32 credits

Testing Process

Which of the following is an example of the test closure activity indicated as "lessons learned"?

Number of correct responses: 1

K21 credit

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

Testing Process

The following are the exit criteria described in the test plan of a software product:

EX1. The test suite for the product must ensure that at least each quality risk item is covered by at least one test case (a quality risk item can be covered by more test cases).

EX2. All test cases in the test suite must be run during the execution phase.

EX3. Defects are classified into two categories: “C” (critical defect) and “NC” (non-critical defect). No known C defects shall exist in the product at the end of the test execution phase.

Which of the following information is useless when the specified exit criteria is evaluated?

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 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