Certified Tester Foundation Level (CTFL v4.0) — Chapter 3: Static Testing

Chapter 3 is about finding defects without executing anything: what static testing is, which work products can be examined, why early feedback is cheap, the activities of the review process, the roles involved, the review types by formality, and the factors that make reviews succeed or fail.

Only four questions, all K1 and K2, and the wording is stable across exam versions. Together with chapter 6 this is the best return on study time in the whole syllabus — two evenings buys you six points.

Where candidates lose these points:

• Static testing finds defects, not failures — nothing is executed, so a failure cannot occur. Any option claiming static testing observes failures is wrong by definition.

• Review types by formality — informal review, walkthrough (led by the author), technical review (peers, documented), inspection (most formal, defined roles and metrics). Questions describe a scenario and ask which type it is.

• Roles — author, manager, facilitator (moderator), scribe, reviewer, review leader. The facilitator runs the meeting, the scribe records, and the author never leads an inspection.

• Static analysis is tool work, review is human work — both are static testing, but they detect different things (coding standard violations and dependencies versus requirement ambiguity).