Practitioner in Agile Quality (PAQ)

PAQ - Overview

The PAQ certification is aimed for people with current Agile knowledge to take their skills to a practitioner level in an intensive learning environment. The certification focusses on practical, accelerated learning in Agile.

As everyone has an equal responsibility for product quality, this module is designed for the whole team.  It covers the key competencies required to function effectively and efficiently whilst delivering quality. The course is focused on practical application, experiential and collaborative learning through discussion and exercises.

Target Group:

This course is designed for anyone wanting to improve their agile skills and ensure accelerated quality delivery of working software.
This includes Testers, QA Engineers, Developers, Business Analysts, Project Managers, Team Leaders, Scrum Masters and all other members of an Agile delivery team.

The Certification

Learning Objectives

  • Agile Mindset - Prove that they can put into practice all the soft skills appropriate to the agile mindset aligned to the agile manifesto and principles
  • Faster Delivery - Optimise delivery through implementing efficiencies and effective practices, maximising the work not done
  • Build Quality In - Implement the team activities to ensure the product quality objectives for each persona are met from inception throughout the product lifecycle
  • Engineering principles - Build the right product, right first time maximising Business value using repeatable, auditable and adaptable processes, whilst minimising technical debt
  • Continuous testing - Support the integration of code by iterating through plan, build, test multiple times per day, in order to complete committed items aligned to acceptance criteria and the iteration definition of done
  • Scalability - Identify additional risks and changes required to effectively scale processes based on team size and/or distribution

Prerequisites

Candidates are expected to have met one of the agile knowledge prerequisites which can be demonstrated through certifications such as ISTQB® Foundation Level Agile Tester OR have 2 years professional experience working in Agile.

Due to the practical experiential learning approach to this course, there is assumed knowledge which, if not met, will make it difficult for candidates to complete the course and assessments within the timeboxed course.

Candidates are expected to be able to already apply basic practices and techniques, such as:

  • Knowledge of Test Design – EP / BVA / State Transition / Decision tables / Exploratory
  • Basic test terminology
  • Understand the difference between functional and non-functional testing including the basic concepts of Performance and Usability testing
  • Perform all the activities associated with the fundamental test process

The Exam

The PAQ assessment exam will be held online with a duration of 2,5 hours. It consists of 2 parts:

  • Practical: Candidates gain credits by demonstrating they can apply the PAQ competencies to complete tasks in a product backlog release that includes user stories, associated design documentation plus a ‘multi-drop’ application seeded with defects.
  • Scenario questions: there will be 1 or 2 scenarios with questions associated with each (up to 5 questions in total across the scenarios). Note: these are not multiple choice but written answers.

The assessment credits are as follows:

Practical credits: 90
Scenario based questions credits: 10
Total credits: 100
Number of credits to pass: 60 (60%)

Candidates are required to score 60 overall credits; there is no pass for each individual part of the assessment.