Practitioner in Agile Quality (PAQ)

The Alliance 4 Qualification has the mission to create globally leading content and certification schemes in an independent environment.   It was founded by different organizations with the aim to work independent from a specific exam provider or a specific training provider with a long term focus on lifelong learning.  A4Q is a new independent place to strengthen quality in the field of training and certification.

This course is designed for anyone wanting to improve their agile skills and ensure accelerated quality delivery of working software.

This includes:

• Testers
• QA Engineers
• Developers
• Business Analysts
• Project Managers
• Team Leaders
• Scrum Masters
• all members of an Agile delivery team

Candidates are expected to have met one of the agile knowledge prerequisites which can be demonstrated through certifications such as ISTQB® Foundation Level Agile Tester OR have 2 years professional experience working in Agile.

Due to the practical experiential learning approach to this course, there is assumed knowledge which, if not met, will make it difficult for candidates to complete the course and assessments within the timeboxed course.

Candidates are expected to be able to already apply basic practices and techniques, such as:

• Knowledge of Test Design – EP / BVA / State Transition / Decision tables / Exploratory
• Basic test terminology
• Understand the difference between functional and non-functional testing including the basic concepts of Performance and Usability testing
• Perform all the activities associated with the fundamental test process

For Individuals:

• Hands on, collaborative learning
• Accelerated path to agile practitioner
• Prove your agile quality competency
• Develop your agile mindset (soft skills)
• Stand out from the crowd with a certification that shows you can do!

For Organizations:

• Accelerate quality in the organizations with agile quality practitioners
• Expand agile competency within your organization
• Demonstrate agile competence to internal and external customers
• Get ahead of the competition with qualified PAQs who can do!

For the Teams:

• Bring the agile team together with a focus on quality
• Develop team competence, collaboration and confidence
• Motivate the team with a career path to practitioner
• Challenge the team to validate they can do with a practical certification!

• Agile mind set – Prove that they can put into practice all the soft skills appropriate to the agile mind-set aligned to the agile manifesto and principles
• Faster Delivery – Optimise delivery through implementing efficiencies and effective practices, maximising the work not done
• Build Quality In – Implement the team activities to ensure the product quality objectives for each persona are met from inception throughout the product lifecycle
• Engineering principles – Build the right product, right first time maximising Business value using repeatable, auditable and adaptable processes, whilst minimising technical debt
• Continuous testing – Support the integration of code by iterating through plan, build, test multiple times per day, in order to complete committed items aligned to acceptance criteria and the iteration definition of done
• Scalability – Identify additional risks and changes required to effectively scale processes based on team size and/or distribution