iSQI Updated CTAL-TAE Exam Questions and Answers by bowie

TAE highlights that logging must balance diagnostic value with execution performance and reliability. Direct synchronous file I/O for every log message can become a bottleneck during bursts, increasing latency and perturbing the timing of the automated interactions—especially for UI or time-sensitive integration tests—leading to flaky outcomes. Since all messages must be permanently stored, dropping burst logs (option C) violates the requirement. NTP synchronization (option A) helps correlate events across systems, but it does not address the performance overhead caused by bursty logging. The most useful approach is to buffer log events in memory and flush them periodically or asynchronously to disk. A circular buffer (or similar in-memory queue) reduces immediate I/O pressure and smooths bursts, while still preserving messages for later analysis when combined with an appropriate flush strategy and sizing. This design is aligned with TAE’s emphasis on making the TAS itself reliable and non-intrusive, ensuring logging supports triage without materially slowing or destabilizing test execution. Therefore, buffering in memory and periodically flushing to log files is the best solution.

The primary problem is execution time; correctness and independence are already strong. TAE recommends improving feedback time for long-running regression suites by parallelizing execution when tests are independent and the infrastructure supports it. Because the tests are explicitly independent, they are well-suited to parallel execution across multiple environments (or multiple nodes within an environment), reducing overall wall-clock duration without changing test intent. Option B addresses crash recovery, but the scenario says executions complete successfully; crash recovery does not solve the current bottleneck. Option A changes the modeling pattern; it may or may not reduce LOC, but it introduces risk and rework without directly addressing runtime. Also, flow model and façade-expanded page objects are already architectural choices aimed at maintainability and reuse; replacing them is not the most direct solution for speed. Option D (improving SUT testability) can help in general, but it is invasive, expensive, and not targeted to the stated issue when tests already yield correct results. Therefore, the best improvement is to split the suite and run parts concurrently on different environments to reduce total execution time, consistent with TAE guidance on scaling automation execution.

TAE stresses that when diagnosing intermittent aborts with unclear root cause, the first priority is ensuring sufficient, consistent observability from the automation side to reconstruct what happened immediately before termination. In this scenario, the suite aborts in different tests across runs, and the final HTML report currently contains full detail only for failing keywords, while successful keywords have reduced logging. If the run aborts due to an exception in the SUT, the “last executed successful keywords” and their full context may be essential to correlate actions with the SUT failure point. The fastest, most direct improvement is to include complete keyword-level logging for successful steps as well, at least until the issue is understood. This aligns with TAE guidance to temporarily increase logging verbosity during investigation to capture the sequence of actions, inputs, timings, and states leading up to failure. Option A could be helpful, but it changes SUT-side logging and may require additional access or instrumentation; also, it does not guarantee visibility into the exact automation step sequence. Options B and D improve presentation/performance of logs but do not add diagnostic content. Therefore, first increase the completeness of the final execution logs for all keywords to maximize evidence for root cause analysis.