International Software Testing Qualification Board
Who can appear for the exam?
There is no prior work experience required before a person appears for this exam but personally I think it’s better to go for this Certification with at least an year of experience working in the software testing field.
Advantages:
1) It’s easy to understand the concepts and relate them to the work done.
2) In case a person is from some different stream(in my case I did my Engineering from Electrical Branch) he/she might not be aware of some basic terms used in IT, which I think is very important to know and understand to increase your chances to crack the exam.
Exam Pattern:
1) Total number of Questions 40
2) All questions are multiple choice questions with only one option as correct option
3) Pass percentage is 65% i.e. in order to clear the exam one has to crack more then 26 questions
4) Also I think the exam is going online from somewhere September 2010
5) There is no negative marking in the exam
6) All the questions are same but the order is different, so most probably you would not have anybody in your close proximity with same order as yours.
7) The questions are mainly 1 mark, 2 marks and 3 marks.
Study material:
If I tell you with my experience two main ingredients for clearing ISTQB Foundation exam:
-Book titled as Foundations of Software Testing by Dorothy Graham, Erik Van Veenendaal, Isabel Evans and Rex Black. This is the best book for Foundation level exam.
-The glossary that can be downloaded from official site of Indian Testing Board.
-Also while preparing for the exams keep watch on K1, K2 and K3 levels because each one of these has corresponding importance.
-For sample question papers search on Internet you would find numerous of them, when I appeared for the exam I had hard copies of most of them but no soft copies.
Time required for preparation of the exam: This is something that depends on an individual, someone who is good at connecting different scenarios with real time situations might take less time but to grasp all the glossary terms you definitely need time. So I would say dedicated 2 weeks time is sufficient to clear this certification.
-Do we require any prior knowledge of any Automation tool before appearing for ISTQB Foundation Level Exam?
The answer is no. You don’t need to have knowledge of any particular automation tool but yes there is one chapter Test Tools & Automation which gives an outlook of why and how the automation is required in Testing life cycle, going through this chapter would be enough to handle questions based on this part.
What you gain by clearing ISTQB Foundation Level Certification?
-You will be able to clear most of you Manual Testing concepts.
-It would help you to understand Process oriented Testing.
-Would make you eligible for appearing for ISTQB advance level Exams
-Would definitely add a value to your CV :)
The blog is open for any comments or queries that you have, feel free to post any questions related to ISTQB Foundation Level exam
