I did the advanced level since it was kind of a group thing. The seminary took place at our company and all from our test group went to the advanced level. There where some useful things in the seminary, no doubt about that, but if was to hire someone, I wouldn’t really be interested if he is a ISTQB certified tester.

In respect to your thorough article, I’ll have some comments:
1. I don’t understand why you wanted the Advanced Certification since you was so dissatisfied from the first exam?
2. ISTQB is a testing board that unifies many communities of testers from all over the world – an ISTQB certification comprises in having a testing knowledge as per the level you are interested: foundation, advanced and probably starting this summer – expert. Thus, besides the syllabus and glossary it is better to have a wider knowledge of the entire test procedures and processes as per the references of the syllabus
3. mostly, all the questions of the ISTQB foundation exam are acceptable, and the fact that you found those 73 pages an inconvenient is an issue for you.
4. regarding the seminar – all the issues that you might have discovered can be reported to ASQF – more, you are kindly asked to because they like to have better courses
5. point 4 above applies also to the examination – I find also unacceptable what you described above regarding the translation issues and so on – have you wrote about it to ASQF?
6. there is an interesting book – unfortunately only in German for the moment written by Spillner onto the Advanced Syllabus – the test management part – it has about 17 pages of bibliography and I consider it a great “summum” of all literature about in the net
7. testing domain is very wide and a syllabus, two or three cannot learn everything – you should see that they are meant to create a common sense of the testing domain
8. in many cases – specially in Europe, the ISTQB certification might be a real help when you are writing it on you resume
9. ISTQB, ISEB, CSTE, etc aren’t anyone linchpins of testing – htey are different tupes of certifications – like your university degree which might be different from mine even if both of us have studied Computer Science
10. as per the commercial side, you’re right, but it’s the way that businesses are working out; we cannot expect that those things could be free; but we, as customers have the right to sort out and decide what we need or we don’t need

Finally, thank you very much for your post – I consider it a good way to communicate on this subject, and maybe someone there (in the software testing community space) will trigger and enhance their products.

This article has very useful information, it will be helpful for many certification exam aspirants. Actually one of my friends first read this article and asked me to visit this page.

It’s really amazing to read this description of this article, Thanks for your efforts.

Thanks,
James
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