After haven been working for around eight months, I start to sense a lack of fundamental knowledge toward testing. Though I am benefited quite a lot from several online resources and documentation of tools (such as Software Testing Help, Postman Blog, and TeamCity Documentation), which provide so great insights and ideas of how software testing and Continuous Integration (CI) work, I am still craving for a systematic way to organize all these things. Or perhaps, something could work as a high-level blueprint for me to dig deeper into each part later.
Thus, I found the ISTQB Certification. In the beginning, I went through each page of the syllabus after downloaded it from the official website. It took me days to complete the whole of it because of so many details, and all the information is just compacted into such a document which is less than a hundred pages. However, the good thing is, since I am working as a test engineer, the keywords of the syllabus are actually in use when I am at work. They just don’t always have exactly the same definitions or adapt the same flows as they are in the document.
The second time of reading took me a shorter time, and I felt it was much easier to highlight what is important. The method that I took is to type down what I read and think it’s important according to keywords of each section as well as the context of the syllabus. I use HackMD to take notes and sort all sort them all.
It is always important to evaluate what the current study progress is by taking a mock exam. After the second approach of the study, I took the mock exam on the GASQ website. The interface of the mock exam is clean and has clear instructions. The examination results provide sufficient information about the scores of each section, which helps the exam taker to see what to improve. The result I got is here (a part of the report):
According to the results of the exam, it is clear that I need to improve the higher-level concepts, such as SDLC and Test Management. Besides, working as a test engineer helps a lot when it comes to the methodologies or techniques section, such as the Tool Support for Testing section. Now it is time to work on keywords of each section and focus on the sections that I scored the least points in the mock exam.
