Last week I attended a Certified Agile Tester (CAT) course. Testing is not an area I'm too involved in, but it gave me a lot of extra detail on Agile ways of working and firmed up my current knowledge.
The course took place over five days, with four days of classroom based learning and team exercises, plenty of additional reading, and one day of exams.
Needless to say this was pretty intense and I haven’t used a pen so much in one day since I was at school. I do feel that examinations like this seem a little backwards nowadays, not least because many of us type faster than we can write! I also felt an Agile course should be more Agile. For example, the course was about Agile team working, but we were scored on solo effort.
The course was useful, and I'd recommend it to anyone looking to learn more about Agile processes, in particular story testing and the role of a Tester in Agile teams.
I get my results in a few weeks' time, and hopefully I'll find out I'm a CAT.
3 comments
Comment by Nicolaj Schweitz posted on
I completely agree with writing the answers by hand being kind of backwards. My hand was torn in cramps the following weekend.
How would you avoid scoring students for their solo effort? I partly see your point of the course being about teamwork, but there should be some kind of filter?
Comment by Piers posted on
I believe a lot could be done by scoring more on participation (the course currently scores up to 10% on active participation at the moment). Set a team a task for the practical assessment. The assessor could act as the product owner and see how they go about tackling the objective and use agile principle's to complete it. It doesn't really matter if the outcome is successful or not as long as it has been set up and completed in the correct way. I think there should still be an element of solo effort but this could be done via a multiple choice exam much like many other courses these days, or if it must be written then provide machines so people can type, if nothing else it eliminates the concern about handwriting being legible so more time can be spent on answering the questions.
Comment by Piers posted on
Just to follow up, I have had the results and have passed the course so very happy about that