IICTI Certified Software Tester

Holders demonstrate that they can apply and evaluate risk-based test strategy and quality engineering governance, advanced test design: model-based, combinatorial and property-based, test automation architecture and maintainability at scale and contract, integration and microservice testing, plus 7 further areas, in realistic professional scenarios, as defined in the AQSCERT scheme for Software Tester.

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

1. 01Risk-based test strategy and quality engineering governance11% of the exam

   • Design an organisation-wide, risk-based test strategy that aligns test effort with business and product risk.
   • Scope: ISO/IEC/IEEE 29119-2/-3, product risk analysis, test policy and strategy, quality characteristics per ISO/IEC 25010:2023, shift-left and shift-right balance, test exit criteria.
2. 02Advanced test design: model-based, combinatorial and property-based18% of the exam

   • Design high-yield test suites by selecting and combining advanced test design techniques for complex systems.
   • Scope: Model-based testing with state machines and graphs, pairwise and n-wise combinatorial coverage (PICT, ACTS), property-based testing (Hypothesis, fast-check), MC/DC and decision coverage.
3. 03Test automation architecture and maintainability at scale10% of the exam

   • Architect a maintainable automation framework and evaluate its return on investment and flakiness profile.
   • Scope: Test pyramid and testing trophy trade-offs, layered automation frameworks, Playwright and Selenium Grid, screenplay and page-object patterns, flaky test detection and quarantine.
4. 04Contract, integration and microservice testing6% of the exam

   • Design integration test approaches that verify distributed service interactions without brittle end-to-end coupling.
   • Scope: Consumer-driven contract testing (Pact), API testing with OpenAPI and schema validation, service virtualisation, Testcontainers, ephemeral environments, event-driven and async message testing.
5. 05Performance, load and resilience engineering7% of the exam

   • Evaluate system performance and resilience using realistic workload models and diagnose bottlenecks from test telemetry.
   • Scope: Workload modelling, k6/Gatling/JMeter, latency percentiles and coordinated omission, capacity and soak testing, chaos engineering experiments, SLO-based acceptance criteria.
6. 06Security testing integration in the delivery lifecycle7% of the exam

   • Design a security verification approach that embeds risk-appropriate security testing across the delivery pipeline.
   • Scope: OWASP ASVS 5.0 and WSTG, SAST/DAST/IAST/SCA placement in pipelines, security regression suites, triage of findings, coordination with penetration testing engagements.
7. 07Continuous testing in CI/CD and test impact analysis8% of the exam

   • Optimise continuous testing pipelines to deliver fast, trustworthy feedback while preserving defect detection capability.
   • Scope: Pipeline quality gates, test impact analysis and selective execution, parallelisation and sharding, mutation testing (Stryker, PIT) for suite effectiveness, feature flags and canary verification.
8. 08Testing AI/ML-enabled and data-intensive systems5% of the exam

   • Evaluate the quality of AI-enabled and data-driven systems using appropriate oracles, metrics and evaluation datasets.
   • Scope: Test oracles for non-deterministic outputs, metamorphic testing, data quality and drift validation, LLM evaluation harnesses, bias and robustness checks, ISO/IEC TS 29119-11 guidance.
9. 09Test data management, environments and privacy compliance6% of the exam

   • Design compliant test data and environment strategies that support reliable and repeatable testing.
   • Scope: Synthetic data generation, data masking and subsetting, GDPR and Albanian data protection law constraints on test data, environment provisioning as code, service and data versioning.
10. 10Defect analytics, quality metrics and root cause analysis8% of the exam

    • Diagnose systemic quality issues from defect and pipeline data and recommend evidence-based process improvements.
    • Scope: DORA metrics, defect escape rate and containment, defect taxonomies (ODC), root cause analysis techniques, risk-based reporting dashboards, statistical trend analysis.
11. 11Leading test practices, process improvement and audits14% of the exam

    • Lead a test organisation's maturity improvement and evaluate its practices against recognised assessment models.
    • Scope: TMMi and TPI NEXT assessments, test process maturity roadmaps, test team structures in agile at scale, stakeholder reporting, regulated-domain audit evidence (ISO 9001, IEC 62304 style traceability).

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