ISTQB’s aims for the certification program are praiseworthy (raising professional profile; providing a career path; normalising understanding …), but there are severe barriers to their attainment.

One of the biggest is that the form of testing they most strongly advocate — formal, process-oriented, strongly documented, and with test design and construction [i]preceding[/i] product design and construction — is not the way testing is done in most organisations, where the predominant mode is relatively chaotic testing that begins only after the software has been written.

I make no judgement here about which style of testing is most valuable. I want instead to address what the ISTQB Foundation Syllabus is really about.

The most important thing to understand about Foundation-level certification is that it’s just that: a foundation. It’s like erecting a tower block for businesses to occupy and work in. You start by clearing the ground, then digging a hole, lining and buttressing it for robustness, and putting in lots of connection to things that you’ll hook the actual building up to later on (gas, water, electricity, sewage, communications …). But the businesses don’t work in the foundations; they have to wait for the rest of the building to go up.

Foundation-level certification [i]doesn’t teach you how to test[/i], nor is it intended to. “The rest of the building” is the ISTQB Advanced Syllabus (or ISEB Practitioner Syllabus). Rather than teaching you “how to test”, the Foundation level is intended to remove a huge mass of misconceptions about what testing is and how it works, and replace them with healthier ideas and a common vocabulary for expressing or discussing them. Armed with those, a Foundation-certified tester should be able to proceed to the higher levels of certification, which are intended to teach you “how to do the job”.

Unfortunately, “the industry” in general has failed to understand this, and HR people and employment agencies in particular think that 2.5 days in a classroom with a piece of paper at the end of it must prove something about a person’s capabilities. I guess it does, at that, but not what they seem to think.

The second thing to realise about the Foundation is that it’s not even a “testers” course. The target audience includes testers, sure, but it also includes “test managers … software developers … project managers, quality managers, software development managers, business analysts, IT directors and management consultants”. These people are important because they create the context in which “testing happens”, but seldom understand “what testing is” or how it works. Consequently, the contexts they create often actively hamper the tester’s work. Unfortunately, the certification is seen as a “testers’ certification”, and it’s rare for people who are not “testers” to attend the training — in fact, it’s common for test managers to get their staff trained in practices that cannot be transported into their working environments because the test managers don’t attend the training themselves.

The upshot of this is that, in the countries for which I have experience (the UK, New Zealand, and Australia), most testers with Foundation certification go back to a workplace in which they are unable to practice much of what they have learnt, and quickly forget their training. From my observation, this is one of the principal reasons why testers generally find the advanced levels of certification so difficult: the examinations assume that candidates have remembered every detail of the Foundation level, as well as the advanced level, whereas the candidates have had no reason whatsoever to do so over the intervening months or years.

I don’t despair of this situation; having lots of criticisms of the ISTQB (and ISEB) Syllabuses and the associated Glossary, I’m working from the inside to try to improve things. However, the ISTQB is a large (worldwide) organisation that’s built up a lot of momentum, and its key members are volunteers with full-time jobs elsewhere, so improvement will be slow. But it will come.

When hiring staff you generally review their resume to confirm that they have completed some type of formalised study. There experience then supports how well they have been able to apply the theoretical based learning to practical situations. Interestingly, I have seen people who have had numerous degrees, masters and PHd’s who were completely incapable of applying it in the real world!

It is becoming increasingly difficult to verify the contents of a candidates resume! Certification or formalised study allows me to verify that what is stated is real as I can check with the issuing authority, but to verify “practical” skills and competencies is a little more challenging. For software testers, we have actually created a “practical” focused assessment that all potential candidates take. The assessment provides them with parts of various level requirements documents and asks the candidate to both review the requirements documents, capturing what they believe is wrong or needs clarification. We then ask them to outline tests that they believe would need to be run to verify the requirements. Exploratory tests are also covered. With testing becoming more technically orientated as a result of agile approaches we are now asking questions around technical competencies such as SQL, XML and programming!

Fundamentally, I view certification in exactly the same light as a programmers computer science degree. It tells me he/she should understand the theory, it doesn’t tell me how good he/she is at applying it in a practical world!