IICTI Certified Software Automation Tester

Holders demonstrate that they can apply and evaluate test automation architecture and framework design, risk-based test strategy and automation portfolio design, flaky test diagnosis and test reliability engineering and aPI, contract and microservice integration automation, plus 7 further areas, in realistic professional scenarios, as defined in the AQSCERT scheme for Software Automation Tester.

Who it is for: Professionals working, or preparing to work, in software development roles.

1. 01Test automation architecture and framework design14% of the exam

   • Architect maintainable, scalable automation frameworks that serve multiple teams and technology stacks.
   • Scope: Layered automation architecture, Page Object vs Screenplay patterns, test data builders and dependency injection, shared libraries across Playwright, Selenium 4 and WebDriver BiDi, ISTQB CTAL-TAE v2.0 generic automation architecture.
2. 02Risk-based test strategy and automation portfolio design9% of the exam

   • Evaluate product risk to design an automation portfolio that maximises defect detection per unit of effort.
   • Scope: Risk-based testing under ISO/IEC/IEEE 29119, test pyramid vs testing trophy trade-offs, coverage models, automation candidate selection, automation ROI and total cost of ownership.
3. 03Flaky test diagnosis and test reliability engineering8% of the exam

   • Diagnose and eliminate flaky tests systematically and design suites that remain deterministic at scale.
   • Scope: Root causes of non-determinism (async waits, ordering dependence, shared state, environment drift), auto-waiting and deterministic clock and network control, trace and video forensics (Playwright Trace Viewer), quarantine and retry policies, flakiness metrics.
4. 04API, contract and microservice integration automation9% of the exam

   • Design integration and contract test strategies that let independently deployed services evolve safely.
   • Scope: REST, GraphQL and gRPC test automation, OpenAPI schema validation, consumer-driven contracts (Pact), service virtualisation (WireMock), Testcontainers, asynchronous and event-driven messaging tests.
5. 05Continuous testing in CI/CD pipelines13% of the exam

   • Architect continuous-testing pipelines that give fast, trustworthy feedback on every change.
   • Scope: Parallelisation and sharding, test impact analysis and selective execution, quality gates, ephemeral preview environments, containerised browser grids (Selenium Grid 4), result analytics and reporting (Allure).
6. 06Performance and load test engineering9% of the exam

   • Design and analyse performance tests that reveal capacity limits and regressions before release.
   • Scope: Workload modelling, open vs closed load models, k6, Gatling and JMeter, distributed load generation, percentile and saturation analysis, correlation with APM and tracing data, performance budgets in CI.
7. 07Mobile and cross-platform automation7% of the exam

   • Evaluate and design mobile and cross-platform automation that balances coverage, speed and device cost.
   • Scope: Appium 2 driver and plugin model, XCUITest and Espresso, real-device clouds vs emulators, gestures and device capabilities, network conditioning, cross-browser and cross-device coverage strategy.
8. 08Test data management and environment virtualisation8% of the exam

   • Design compliant test data and environment strategies that make automated suites repeatable and independent.
   • Scope: Synthetic data generation, masking and subsetting of production data under GDPR, database seeding and isolation strategies, stateful fixture management, environment parity, infrastructure as code for test environments.
9. 09Advanced verification techniques8% of the exam

   • Evaluate suite effectiveness and apply advanced verification techniques where conventional example-based tests fall short.
   • Scope: Property-based testing, mutation testing (Stryker, PIT), model-based testing (GraphWalker), visual regression testing, automated accessibility checks (axe-core) against WCAG 2.2.
10. 10AI-assisted automation and testing of AI-enabled features5% of the exam

    • Evaluate AI-assisted testing tools and design reliable test approaches for AI-enabled software.
    • Scope: LLM-assisted test generation and maintenance, self-healing locators and their risks, oracle problems for non-deterministic outputs, evaluation-based assertions, ISTQB CT-AI concepts, governance of AI-generated test code.
11. 11Test automation governance, metrics and practice leadership10% of the exam

    • Lead a test automation practice, setting standards and metrics that demonstrate business value.
    • Scope: Automation coding standards and review, escaped-defect and change-failure-rate metrics, suite health KPIs, tool selection and vendor evaluation, automation roadmaps, capability building across teams.

Question types

Single choice 100%

Delivery

Online (remote proctored), Test centre, On-site (corporate)

Retakes

Up to three attempts within any 12-month period. A 14-day waiting period applies after a first unsuccessful attempt and 30 days after a second. Each retake requires a new booking and fee. Retakes draw a different randomised form from the question bank.

Provisional cut score — psychometric validation is required before live delivery. Blueprint v1.0.

1. 1

   Register

   Create a free account and start the programme.

2. 2

   Practice

   Online practice test (coming soon).

3. 3

   Training

   Optional

   Online course or classroom — or skip it.

4. 4

   Certification

   Independent exam and certification decision.

Training is optional and does not by itself confer certification. Find a training partner