ISTQB CT-TAE – Certified Tester Test Automation Engineer — Question 44

You are the TAE for an Agile project which has six sprints for the current release. Sprint five is underway and the automated regression suite is due to start later today.
You have re-examined the results from the automated regression runs for the past four sprints. You notice that two test cases both reported a pass for sprints 1 and 4 but a fail for sprints 2 and 3. The failures have gone undetected and are therefore unexplained. Both test cases are closely coupled with other tests in the suite.
What course of action SHOULD you take?

Answer options

• A. Run the regression suite as planned and see If the tests fail again if they do, determine the cause of failure.
• B. Remove the test cases from the regression suite and refer them to the test designer for manual testing for future sprints.
• C. Quarantine the test cases, run the regression suite without them, and perform root cause analysis on the test cases in parallel.
• D. Run the test cases manually now. If they still pass, keep them in the regression suite, if they fail perform root cause analysis.

Correct answer: C

Explanation

The correct option is C because quarantining the test cases allows the regression suite to run without the risk of failing due to potentially flawed tests, while also enabling a focused investigation into the issues with those test cases. Option A is not ideal since it risks repeating failures, B removes potentially important tests without analysis, and D doesn't address the underlying issues effectively.