3 Courses for Success!

Agile United - Certified Practitioner in Agile Testing (AU-CPAT) has been designed for Agile team members, and testers in particular, who are looking to improve their knowledge, people skills, Agile skills, testing skills and technology skills by taking this hands-on and interactive training course. This training will help you and your team develop better software by teaching you about testing and quality. We will cover learning objectives that may surprise you, such as teaching you interactively about mental models and critical thinking, we will also help you do highly effective risk analysis with modern tools, and we will implement hands-on exploratory testing with real software and hardware that runs throughout the training.

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Day One

To kick-start the course, we will briefly explore what Agile is, what it means to be Agile and what an Agile way of working means. We will also dive into the challenges that teams face which lead to quality related issues. We understand the importance of mental models, critical thinking skills and beneficial questioning.

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During the second half of day one, we will introduce a product which we will work with during the whole training. We will learn about the product by play, exploration and making several models to help us think about risks and the best strategy to use to test the product.

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By the end of day one, you will be able to:

• Describe the concepts of Agile and how they affect software development

• Explain how testing and quality fit in an Agile way of working (using Scrum)

• Explain what Agile means for the skills of a tester

• Talk about testing in an Agile context

• Describe what models are

• Explain how models benefit and enact thinking and talking about testing and quality

• Create different types of models using the heuristic test strategy model

• Create models with mind maps

• Describe what risks are

• Apply different techniques for discovering risks, such as horror plots, the headline game & risk storming

• Hypothesise and construct different types of risks that might affect a product or project

• Construct testing activities from risks

• Explain what a test strategy is

• Talk about the parts of a test strategy

• Build and expand a test strategy fast

• Ask efficient questions to learn about the product, the context and

• Identify situations where ambiguity is slowing us down.

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Day Two

At the beginning of day two, we will do actual testing on the product, based on the risk analysis and test strategy made on day one. While testing, we will further expand our strategy and risk models. We will learn how to construct and expand testing activities and learn how to document your testing as lean as possible while still being useful.

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During the second part of the day, we will move on to the topic of collaboration and communication within an Agile team. We will explore refinement and sprint planning to learn how a tester can add maximum value in a variety of situations.

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By the end of day two, you will be able to:

• Explain what session-based testing is

• Create charters for sessions to learn about the product and test it

• Document what you learn using a variety of approaches

• Explain why note-taking is important

• Take efficient and concise notes

• Explain the basics of critical thinking

• Explain why critical thinking is important in software development

• Identify claims, conclusions and reasoning in your own thinking

• Identify cognitive biases, false reasons and logical fallacies

• Describe different software development activities and zoom in on communication and collaboration from a quality and testing perspective

• Discuss some of the challenges surrounding communication and how to overcome them

• Explain the role of testing and quality in Scrum ceremonies

• Review user stories

• Identify challenges in your team using user stories

• Explain the benefits of splitting user stories in smaller parts from a quality perspective

 

Day Three

During the first part of day three, we will do some more testing on the product in sessions. We will learn how to explain the status of the product, what we did and the remaining risks using the testing story.

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We will later dive deeper into the topics of collaboration and communication in an Agile team, using retrospectives and Sprint reviews.

 

Finally, we will discuss how tooling can help accelerate teams' work.

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By the end of day three, you will be able to:

• Explain how to report your testing, using a variety of approaches in and outside of scrum ceremonies

• Give your stakeholders insight into the testing and quality of the product

• Use the basics of storytelling in your daily work

• Explain what feedback is

• Provide feedback in an effective way, using different approaches

• Explain the purpose and benefits of a retrospective

• Facilitate basic retrospectives to help accelerate the team performance by removing waste and reflect on the way of working

• Explain how tooling can accelerate teams' performance

• Guide your team to talk about testability and the appropriate use of automation and tooling

• Talk to your stakeholders about the benefits and traps of using automation

• Explain what quality coaching is and how teams benefit from it

• Explain how professional Agile testers add value in a variety of ways, depending on the context you are in

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Prerequisites:

Although there aren't any mandatory prerequisites, you will get a lot more from the course if you already hold the ISTQB Certified Tester Foundation Level (CTFL) & ISTQB CTFL-Agile Tester (CTFL-AT) Certificates — as this course will not cover the fundamentals and terminology of Testing and Agile.

Other recommendations are that you hold another Agile or Scrum certificate, such as PSM or CSM or ASF or at least reading through the Scrum guide. Please refer to the syllabus for more ideas and literature  recommendations.