A team is struggling with a high number of defects in a legacy module. They want to understand the underlying causes before making changes. Which root cause analysis technique would be most appropriate?

Conduct a brainstorming session to list all possible defects.

Use a cause-and-effect diagram to explore potential causes such as code complexity, documentation, and skill levels.

Perform a Pareto analysis to identify the most frequent defect types.

Review the defect history and fix the most common defects first.

A team has completed a root cause analysis and identified that the main cause of defects is insufficient time for testing due to overly optimistic sprint commitments. The team wants to integrate this finding into their continuous improvement process, but the product owner is resistant to reducing scope. Which action is most effective?

Ask the product owner to prioritize defects over new features.

Reduce the amount of testing performed to meet the sprint commitment.

Use the root cause analysis data to negotiate with the product owner for more realistic sprint commitments.

Increase the testing effort by asking testers to work overtime.

Which practice best supports integrating root cause analysis findings into an agile team's continuous improvement process?

Keeping findings in a private document only for the test lead

Deleting findings after the defect is closed

Reviewing root cause analysis findings in the next retrospective

Waiting for the annual quality audit to address findings

A team has a recurring defect that appears only in the production environment. The root cause analysis points to a difference in configuration between test and production. The team wants to prevent this from happening again, but they have limited resources. Which action is most effective?

Implement a configuration management process to ensure test and production environments are aligned.

Add more tests to the regression suite to catch configuration issues.

Document the configuration differences and share them with the team.

Ask the operations team to manually verify the production configuration before each release.

Certified Tester Agile Test Leadership at Scale

Domain 3Objective 4

Root Causes CT-ATLAS Practice Questions (Page 1)

Part of the Continuous Improvement of Quality and Testing domain, which makes up ~17% of our current practice bank. ISTQB does not publish an official question count, but from its 120-minute exam (~50–80 total, ~9–14 in this domain), expect 2–3 from this objective — we provide 18 practice questions to prepare you well beyond it. (estimate)

18questions here

4free pages

3concepts

Questions 1–5

1application · medium
A team is struggling with a high number of defects in a legacy module. They want to understand the underlying causes before making changes. Which root cause analysis technique would be most appropriate?
Select an answer first
2expert · hard
A team has completed a root cause analysis and identified that the main cause of defects is insufficient time for testing due to overly optimistic sprint commitments. The team wants to integrate this finding into their continuous improvement process, but the product owner is resistant to reducing scope. Which action is most effective?
Select an answer first
3foundation · easy
Which root cause analysis technique involves repeatedly asking 'why' to drill down from a symptom to a deeper underlying cause?
Select an answer first
4foundation · easy
Which practice best supports integrating root cause analysis findings into an agile team's continuous improvement process?
Select an answer first
5expert · hard
A team has a recurring defect that appears only in the production environment. The root cause analysis points to a difference in configuration between test and production. The team wants to prevent this from happening again, but they have limited resources. Which action is most effective?
Select an answer first

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Root Causes CT-ATLAS Practice Questions (Page 1)

Questions 1–5

A team is struggling with a high number of defects in a legacy module. They want to understand the underlying causes before making changes. Which root cause analysis technique would be most appropriate?

Which root cause analysis technique involves repeatedly asking 'why' to drill down from a symptom to a deeper underlying cause?

Which practice best supports integrating root cause analysis findings into an agile team's continuous improvement process?

A team has a recurring defect that appears only in the production environment. The root cause analysis points to a difference in configuration between test and production. The team wants to prevent this from happening again, but they have limited resources. Which action is most effective?

Keep studying — Continuous Improvement of Quality and Testing