IICTI Certified Software Quality Engineer

Holders demonstrate that they can apply and evaluate risk-based quality engineering strategy, test architecture and automation framework design, contract, integration and microservices testing and performance, scalability and reliability testing, plus 7 further areas, in realistic professional scenarios, as defined in the AQSCERT scheme for Software Quality Engineer.

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

1. 01Risk-based quality engineering strategy10% of the exam

   • Design an organisation-wide quality engineering strategy driven by product risk and quality attributes.
   • Scope: Risk-based testing, ISO/IEC/IEEE 29119, ISO/IEC 25010 quality models, quality attribute prioritisation, test portfolio economics and shift-left/shift-right balance.
2. 02Test architecture and automation framework design9% of the exam

   • Architect maintainable automation frameworks that give fast, trustworthy feedback across all test layers.
   • Scope: Test pyramid and trophy trade-offs, layered automation architecture, Playwright, contract and component testing, test data and environment management, flakiness control.
3. 03Contract, integration and microservices testing9% of the exam

   • Design integration and contract testing approaches that validate distributed systems without brittle end-to-end suites.
   • Scope: Consumer-driven contracts with Pact, service virtualisation, API schema validation, testcontainers, ephemeral environments and testing event-driven systems.
4. 04Performance, scalability and reliability testing9% of the exam

   • Evaluate system performance and resilience through realistic workload models and controlled failure experiments.
   • Scope: Load, stress, soak and spike testing with k6, Gatling and JMeter, workload modelling, latency percentiles, capacity baselines and chaos engineering experiments.
5. 05Advanced test design and coverage analysis9% of the exam

   • Design test suites whose effectiveness is demonstrated through coverage and mutation analysis rather than test count.
   • Scope: Model-based and combinatorial testing, property-based testing, mutation testing, MC/DC and coverage criteria, equivalence and boundary techniques at scale.
6. 06Quality in CI/CD and release engineering9% of the exam

   • Design CI/CD quality gates and release practices that maintain velocity while controlling change failure rate.
   • Scope: Quality gates, test impact analysis, parallelisation and sharding, feature flags, canary and progressive delivery, DORA metrics and deployment risk scoring.
7. 07Security and compliance testing integration9% of the exam

   • Integrate security and compliance verification into the quality pipeline with actionable, auditable results.
   • Scope: SAST, DAST, SCA and IaC scanning, OWASP ASVS, SBOM and supply-chain checks, security regression suites and evidence for regulated audits.
8. 08Production quality, observability and defect analytics9% of the exam

   • Diagnose quality issues using production telemetry and defect analytics to target prevention efforts.
   • Scope: Testing in production, synthetic monitoring, SLO-based quality signals, defect root-cause analysis, defect escape and density metrics, Pareto and trend analysis.
9. 09Testing AI-enabled and data-intensive systems9% of the exam

   • Design verification approaches for AI and data-driven components where outputs are probabilistic.
   • Scope: ML model validation, data quality testing, LLM output evaluation, non-determinism handling, bias and robustness testing, ISO/IEC TR 29119-11 guidance.
10. 10Accessibility and usability quality assurance9% of the exam

    • Evaluate products for accessibility and usability compliance and embed these checks into delivery.
    • Scope: WCAG 2.2 AA conformance, EN 301 549 and European Accessibility Act, automated (axe) and manual assistive-technology testing, usability evaluation methods.
11. 11Quality governance, metrics and process improvement9% of the exam

    • Lead quality governance and process improvement programmes using metrics and maturity models.
    • Scope: Quality KPIs and dashboards, TMMi and CMMI maturity assessment, ISO 9001 alignment, audit readiness, cost of quality and continuous improvement leadership.

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