At the risk of digging up old debates, is the general feeling still that ISTQB qualifications aren’t really in keeping with the practices of the modern, agile tester?
I see that they have a lot more certifications on offer now, including a couple with the word “agile” on. Has anyone here done one of the newer certifications and can share some opinions?
German companies care a lot about official certifications, and ISTQB is the one pretty much everyone knows. I’ve been a bit resistant, wondering if I really want to do the kind of testing that’s rumoured to be taught in such courses. But maybe they’ve done some good updates since the last time I looked at the foundation curriculum, and it’s actually worthwhile for something more than just ticking a box. What do you think?
It’s also been a while for myself but I tend to view that some of the baggage it can create carries with some people throughout their career and it can be harder to reverse engineer some of the thinking.
On the agile side, it did have some strong elements of command and control. In hierarchical environments I have seen managers and teams find elements of it useful, same common terms, higher levels of documentation and evidence and testing following a controlled potentially limiting process. It did also contain a reasonable bias towards scripted testing and covering known risks.
When I think of agile I tend to think collaboration alongside trusted and empowered team members and that is for me slightly counter to a more C&C approach.
Note that when I think agile its not straight to being about automation, waterfall was often much heavier automation than agile as it tended to favour the scripted testing approach. However automation still remains one of the things many others refer to first when the talk about testing in an agile environment, I do not know if their courses with agile terms in them go down that latter path retaining a higher level of C&C aspects.
I did find some of the advance course topics useful, learning some design techniques etc. Likely better sources but they are worth learning just to have them in your toolbox till they become second nature and you almost forget you are using a specific “technique”.
The fundamental view of what testing is all about and the value it brings, was where I saw a lot of difference from those learning elsewhere, that may be a good gauge of where they are at now.
Thanks for your detailed response, Andy. I’m a bit surprised about the part re automation, but the rest is pretty in line with my impressions thus far. I’m a bit hesitant to pay so much money just to tick a box and largely push away the content lol Best case would be to find an employer who wants to pay for it, and then we both get something. Bit chicken and egg though.
I never did a certification in testing. Nor, do I ever plan to do one.
If your potential employer/target country jobs want you to be certified even to do an interview, this is a tricky question. Probably in that case you would have to do it to get recruitable.
However, in most companies, that I have seen mentioning ISTQB, I see ISTQB as desired/preferred and not mandatory.
I personally chose to do the BBST 3.0 to get a grip on my foundations and that was one of the best decisions I took. I also feel that building a portfolio / showcasing your work is a better way to get recruited in today’s times instead of showing a certification.
I’m in the same boat as you.
German companies are a bit bureaucracy hungry so they seek compliance in everything. I’m also resisting spending time on ISTQB since I’ve got several other skills (German language and driving) to hone too. That being said I do come across jobs in the German market with no, or as Rahul pointed out, only preferred requirement of ISTQB.
For now I work with a workaround by writing:
ISTQB (I chose not to do this and am happy to discuss why)
As per my research, people often say that if a company rejects you on basis of a certification, they were not worth working for in the first place!
p.s Here’s something I very often say in this regard “I once bought a udemy course for ISTQB but then started to fall asleep on the 7th day”
Thanks for reminding me about BBST! I’ve heard good things about that.
Yes, some companies require ISTQB and some prefer it. I tend to wonder if they specify ISTQB because that really is just the only testing certification they’re aware of, or because they think it’s a good reflection of how they (want to) do things.
Regardless, in this job market, with so many other highly qualified candidates, every small thing makes a difference, and having a certification or not may tip the scales.
Oh yes, I used to have “ask me, ‘why not ISTQB?’” on my CV next to RST Explored, but I don’t have enough space for it now lol I’ve been concentrating on building up other skills as well - ones I’m happy to use on the job and have fewer doubts about.
You got as far as day seven? Impressive! I think I gave up after the first page of the curriculum
How have you been finding the German market in general?
Its a bit tough. Haven’t been able to land any interviews but I have also not been very frequent in job hunts (I get too focused on upskilling)
Of the experience I had, some recruiters called me but it didn’t work. A few of them made the lamest of excuses e.g. “you’re experienced in mobile testing we need someone with experience in frontend and backend testing”
On some instances despite fitting the JD perfectly I couldn’t make it. I think generally the market for testers is a lot tougher and language skill has more weightage than ISTQB imo for now. I need language for getting better at daily life here so ISTQB can stay at the very bottom of my priority list.
ISTQB was never fit for purpose and is even less so now. BBST is excellent - we put all our testers through all three of the paid-for, tutor-led AST versions of the Foundations, Bug Advocacy and Test Design courses in their first year with us.
We gave them 5 days’ paid leave to do each course and they did the rest in their own time. That’s a lot of time off work, but it was well worth it.
We also put everyone through Bach and Bolton’s RST course in their second year with us. Why on earth would anyone do ISTQB when training like that is available?
I don’t buy this “you can’t get a job without it” justification. I don’t have it and this was no impediment to me building my company, which had 25 staff at its peak. Almost no one I recruited had it - I preferred to recruit people who didn’t. And if a client insists on ISTQB, that’s an indication that we’re really not going to get on together, so it’s best to go our separate ways.
Most hiring managers are clueless, and HR should never be allowed anywhere near the recruitment process. However, there are still some good managers who know how to spot great testers. Anyone who worked for my company, for a start - they are all on LinkedIn. And even some in Europe, like Huib Schoots and Beren Van Daele.
I’m not even sure you can use the word “Agile” in conjunction with test training. The key things I took away from ISTQB was language and terminology and a bit of methodology. ISTQB however can give you big baggage problems if it’s the first learning you do get. It can be quite damaging, the real world is much less about regulation than you might come away thinking if all you did was ISTQB. It is just a tickbox, very helpful for anyone who does not have a university degree.
I would love to do the RST course now, but after nearly 20 years, a course is not going to change how I test that much, which is why starting with a good grounding is really critical.
Sounds like you had a great training and development offering!
That’s my pickle with the companies who ask for ISTQB. I don’t know whether that’s a reflection of how they (want to) approach testing and quality, or if it’s just the only testing certification that they know about. Just like interviewing candidates, I try not to make any assumptions, and instead ask about their approach directly during interviews.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts. That’s pretty in line with what I’ve heard about ISTQB before.
I was lucky enough to do RST Explored in 2019, but I haven’t seen any company ask for it. Again, I wonder if they just ask for ISTQB because they don’t know any others.
I’m curious - what do you think could change how you test? Have any new trends, tooling, or insights from others had any impact on your approach over the years?
I was a coder for about 14 years before I moved into Test. My first 2 test jobs were almost pure API and non-GUI roles, but as time passed I wanted something on my CV that said I was a tester, and that was going to be dead easy and possible to do in a holiday I took the easy route. You just sit an exam in an office in any big city to pass the basic ISTQB, I used a week of normal leave to study and added that to my CV because it would at least get me interviews if needed in future. Turns out it did help.
But the more hands-on learning in the format of for example the RST course, and in fact a lot of the MOT community interactions give you, are far more valuable, but are hard to swallow. For example I’m not trying out new tools very often at all, and an ISTQB certainly wouldn’t foster that. I also really need my head changed on the entire topic of product risk, who owns the risk, how much to worry and then of course how to focus on your own wheelhouse. I have always been about often minute unimportant details, but been too good at worrying about big picture while doing little about it. I’d like to learn to use other communication tools, not just jira. Jira gives you very little insights.
By agile tester, one can understand a tester working in an Agile environment or a tester working with agility. ‘Modern tester’ also has multiple variations based on the group of people one associates themselves.
And I doubt ISTQB offers a ‘qualification’, or competency in testing. They offer certifications.
I feel that testing generally isn’t led by competent testers. But as a tester, we have the choices: apply to a job where ISTQB is required, or don’t. Argue about how useless it is or do a paid-by-company certification as an exercise.
The last ISTQB(free cert) I did was the Agile one, and it felt like doing a quiz from a child who googled a lot of Agile stuff from random blogs on the internet.
Oh, I feel the pain. Sometimes you get to find companies with smart people, that understand that testing is an exploratory, experiential, experimental, investigative approach to finding risks and potential problems.
And sometimes there’s rarely a choice.
I lost my soul and motivation of wanting to stay in testing by getting into companies that want to follow standards and templates and rely on ISTQB/Agile/ITIL/PMBOK++++ for processes.
I’ve done 2xISTQB, 4xBBST, and 2xRST. By far BBST, and RST developed my testing skills, while ISTQB tried to keep me dumb and easy to manipulate.
I’ve not seen the purpose of your quest. Do you want to learn something? Have a certification to put on CV? Get a job at specific companies?
Our operational model was to have a robust selection process, recruit great people who had the potential to reach the very top, then give them all the high quality training and personal development they could absorb. And it worked - I’m really proud of all the old team.
Sadly, that model just doesn’t fly these days. Clients don’t value good testing and wouldn’t recognise it if it was under their nose. We have almost entirely stopped doing functional testing and everyone has moved on. Instead, we’re almost entirely focused on accessibility services now.
Almost every aspect of agile development is now a dumpster fire and I want no part of it. Software testing quality has always been poor, thanks largely to ISTQB, but I never imagined it would descend to the appalling level it is now. Most of what testers need to know is out there and has been for nearly 30 years, but they don’t read it or put it into practice.
I wouldn’t care, but I have to use the crappy software that gets barfed out the door by all these agile development teams. Rant over - I need to lie down now.
Learn something for sure, but I don’t expect to get that from ISTQB. I’m going through a bunch of other courses for that.
Having a certification for the CV and ticking boxes is the main motivator, sadly. With such a bad market and so many qualified testers looking, I’m thinking of ways to not get automatically filtered out, based on keywords. Also, companies in Germany really like certifications, regardless of how many years’ experience you have, so it kind of seems like I need to get on board with that or suffer the consequences… But which evil is worse, I wonder.
I’ve gotten a lot of helpful information and opinions from this thread though. And it seems like this particular slice of certifications still isn’t it for the kind of tester who would even be on an MoT forum in the first place. So for now, I think I’m on the right path to save my pennies and focus on my actual learning journey, which I’m actually enjoying and finding useful.
“Is it a reflection of how they want to approach testing and quality”
for me it often has been and carries at least an amber flag that my testing contribution would be narrowed down significantly and I’d be doing a lot of what I regard as low value activities.
Are they companies to avoid, perhaps but they are also often the one’s that need the most help evolving’s so if you like a challenge?
Its slightly less of a red flag on a candidate but experience has made me seriously consider if I need to reverse engineer some of the thinking they picked up from this being their only source of knowledge.
That’s what I’m thinking - am I really okay doing that kind of stuff, but also - clear area for improvement that I could get to work on, soo…
Thanks for sharing your thoughts re candidates. I’m glad you and others have brought it up, because while ISTQB might make some companies more keen, it might put off the exact kind of people I want to work with.
