ISTQB CTAL-TAE case studies

ISTQB CTAL-TAE · Put your knowledge to work in context.

The ISTQB® Certified Tester Advanced Level Test Automation Engineering (CTAL-TAE) v2.0 is an advanced-level, vendor-neutral qualification in the ISTQB® portfolio. Per ISTQB®, the certification focuses on the design, development, and maintenance of test automation solutions, and it also covers the concepts, methods, tools, and processes for automating dynamic functional tests. The ISTQB CTAL-TAE case studies are 5 cases and about 5,100 words.

Parallelism exposes non-determinism in a 1,240-test Selenium regression suite

FinBank's web regression suite has 1,240 Selenium tests running against a shared staging environment. Last quarter the suite ran serially in 5 h 40 min on 3 agents; the team moved to 16 parallel browser sessions across 4 agents and wall-clock time fell to 38 min, but the flake rate rose from 3% to 17%.

1,043 words, about 5 min 2

Tool selection: codeless vendor versus an open-source stack for a mixed mainframe, API and web estate

Northwind Insurance is selecting an automation tool for a claims platform with three interfaces: 400 IBM 3270 green screens, 260 REST endpoints, and an Angular back-office UI. Six delivery teams and 40 testers support a release every four weeks; only three testers write code comfortably.

1,007 words, about 5 min 3

Re-prioritising automation coverage against risk when 62% automated still leaves the risky areas manual

Halcyon Retail has 2,300 manual regression test cases for its order management system. 62% are automated, but a coverage analysis shows automation touches only 18% of the requirements rated high risk, while it heavily covers pricing screens that change twice a year.

1,072 words, about 5 min 4

Deterministic test data and a virtualised payment switch under data protection constraints

MediClaim processes healthcare claims and is subject to data protection rules. Test environments use a masked copy of production refreshed every eight weeks.

980 words, about 5 min 5

Making a quality gate and dashboard meaningful when the pipeline is green and production is not

Orion Logistics runs a CI/CD pipeline with unit tests, 3,000 API tests, and 900 UI tests. The UI stage takes 55 minutes and only runs nightly; API tests run on every pull request.

998 words, about 5 min