ISTQB® Certified Tester - Agile Test Leadership at Scale (CT-ATLaS) v2.0 Press Release

ISTQB® has released the Certified Tester - Agile Test Leadership at Scale v2.0 (CT-ATLaS).

After publishing three increments in 2021 in a beta version and a minimum viable product (MVP v1.0) in May 2022, ISTQB® has now released the official full ATLaS certification v2.0. This is the first certification that addresses the unique quality and testing challenges in a scaled Agile organization. As more organizations recognize the imperative to transform their operations to remain relevant and competitive in our volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) world, new collaborative methods in large and distributed environments have emerged and continue to evolve. Business agility is crucial for organizations to adapt swiftly to unexpected changes. Merely having a software development team that's agile isn't sufficient. The entire organization, including the quality and testing sectors, must evolve to enhance business agility.

The ATLaS certification offers a fresh approach to test management and quality assurance, promoting business agility at an organizational level. The goal is to nurture a value-centric quality mindset and culture. It seeks to provide genuine leadership by helping organizations craft organizational test strategies and team structures that pave the way for DevOps and support teams in performing quality improvement experiments.

ISTQB® product owner for ATLaS, Mette Bruhn-Pedersen, explains why she is convinced that ISTQB® ATLaS is relevant: “Many organizations have realized that Agile principles and methodologies can help them innovate and bring value to customers. However, in their transformation they often focus on the overall governance and leave quality and technical agility for later. If your organization does not have a quality mindset and culture, it is hard to increase speed and make changes fast. ATLaS provides ideas for fostering a quality culture through continuous improvement. With v2.0 ATLaS expands on structural challenges which many organizations face in their transformation and the need for creating and adapting an organizational test strategy to ensure the right capabilities are developed.

ATLaS was also developed using an Agile approach. We released a minimum viable product with v1.0 in a handful of countries. Based on the feedback, we have adjusted some of the content in v2.0. We have especially strengthen the connection with testing in the two new chapters. This concludes the ATLaS product development. In the future we will update the content based on feedback from the community. So please send us your experiences with ATLaS and how it helps you to achieve important business outcomes and key results in your organization. We are also interested in feedback and suggestions for improving the certification.”

Klaudia Dussa-Zieger, ISTQB® President echoed the positive sentiment of the General Assembly regarding this release, "I would like to thank Mette Bruhn-Pedersen and the ATLaS core team and their contributors for their
tremendous efforts in developing, promoting and supporting the ATLaS certification. There is a need to re-think the why, what, and how of test organizations in many companies. The ability to ”scale” quality and testing is key in Agile organizations. By tapping into the Agile transformation programs test managers and test leaders can play an important role as change agents who promote both an Agile mindset and a quality culture. I hope ATLaS can inspire test managers, heads of test departments, leaders of test competency centers, and other Agile practitioners to transform the way they approach testing and quality".

Read more about the contents of ATLaS here:
https://www.istqb.org/certifications/agile-test-leadership-at-scale