ISTQB CT-AT cheat sheet

Technical Testing Skills in Agile Organizations

• Review types by formality: informal, walkthrough, technical review, inspection; inspection is most formal with defined roles, entry/exit criteria, and metrics.

• Static analysis finds defects without executing code (coding standards, complexity, data flow, security patterns); it is cheaper per defect than dynamic testing but cannot prove runtime behavior.

• Non-functional testing in Agile: performance (load, stress, spike), security (authentication, authorization, injection, session), reliability, and usability are tested per increment, not only at the end.

• API and integration testing verify contracts between components; contract testing catches consumer-provider mismatches earlier than end-to-end UI tests.

• Test data management: synthetic or masked data, data generation per test, and cleanup; production data use raises privacy and repeatability risks.

• Defect management in Agile favors immediate fixing over formal reports; where tracked, include environment, build, steps, expected/actual, and severity based on risk.

• Test environment needs: representative configuration, controlled versions, and observability (logs, metrics, traces) so failures can be diagnosed quickly.

• Agile team quality ownership: whole-team responsibility, testers coach others on test design, and quality is built in via reviews, TDD, and automation rather than a final test phase.