Certified Practitioner in Agile Testing (CPAT)

Agile United Certified Practitioner in Agile Testing (AU-CPAT) has been designed for agile team members, and testers in specific, who are looking to improve their knowledge, people skills, agile skills, testing skills and technology skills. This hands-on and interactive training course will help you and your team develop better software by teaching you about testing and quality. Besides learning objectives on agile, testing and quality, we will also cover objectives that may surprise you like teaching you interactively about mental models and critical thinking. We also help you doing highly effective risk analysis with modern tools and we explain hands-on exploratory testing with real software and hardware that runs throughout the training. If you are looking to give your Agile testing career a boost or someone looking to fill in gaps in your knowledge and skills, this course is for you.

Program

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 teams face which lead to quality related issues.

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

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 like 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 powerful questions to learn about the product, the context and
Identify situations where ambiguity is slowing us down

Day Two

In the first part of day two, we’ll do actual testing on the product based on the risk analysis and test strategy made in 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.

In the second part, we’ll move onto collaboration and communication while working in an agile team. Here we will explore refinement and sprint planning to learn how a tester can add maximum value in a variety of situations.

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 powerful 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 team using user stories
Explain the benefits of splitting user stories in smaller parts from a quality perspective

Day Three

In the first part of day three, we’ll 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.

In the second part, we’ll dive deeper into collaboration and communication in an agile team using retrospectives and Sprint reviews. Finally, we will discuss how tooling can help accelerate teams.

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 in 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 by removing waste and reflect on the way of working
Explain how tooling can accelerate teams
Guide your team to talk about testability and 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

Practical information

Pre-requisites

Although there aren't any mandatory prerequisites, you will get a lot more from the course if you have already hold the ISTQB CTFL-Agile Tester Certificate - as this course will not cover the fundamentals and terminology. Therefor, knowledge and at least first experiences working in an agile environment is recommended. This practical training will provide you a variety of approaches and techniques to think and talk about testing and quality and improve your hands-on (people, agile, testing and tooling) skills.