SOFTECAsia

Selamat Hari Raya Aidiladha to our Muslim members, partners, and friends.

May this blessed day bring peace to your homes and warmth to every gathering you keep. From all of us at MSTB.

The CTFL is where most testing careers begin. For too many, it’s also where they end.

ISTQB® Advanced Level was designed for what comes next — the moment “tester” becomes too small a word, and you start to specialise. Lead the function. Design the tests that matter. Go technical. Build the automation machinery beneath it all. Or test inside the team, not after it.

Five modules. Five distinct paths.

→ CTAL-TM — Test Manager. For those shaping strategy, risk, and the testing organisation.

→ CTAL-TA — Test Analyst. For those translating user expectations into test cases that validate behaviour and value.

→ CTAL-TTA — Technical Test Analyst. For those working closer to the code, where reliability and architecture are the brief.

→ CTAL-TAE — Test Automation Engineer. For those designing automation architecture and embedding it into CI/CD.

→ CTAL-AT — Agile Tester (newly elevated by ISTQB in May 2026, v2.0). For those whose testing lives inside the sprint, embedded with the team.

All five modules are administered in Malaysia by the Malaysian Software Testing Board. CTFL is the prerequisite. Each exam is RM 1,050 (before 8% SST).

Swipe through to see where each path leads.
Examination scheme and registration → https://mstb.org/examination-scheme/

MSTB's Test Design Competition is back — and it's been completely redesigned.

TDC 2.0 challenges university teams to test a real-world IT system running in production, with poor or no Software Requirements Specification. No hand-holding. Teams must analyse, strategise, design, implement, and automate their testing approach from scratch.

What's new in Version 2.0:
— Practice Requirements Engineering
— Adopt & Integrate Technologies using real tools
— Define Organization & Processes (DevOps, Agile)
— Develop Hard & Soft Skills (critical thinking, innovation, presentation)

How it works:
On Campus Challenge (Jun–Aug):
Part 1 — Strategize, Analyze & Design: develop SQA strategy, test analysis & design, plan test implementation and select test tools.
Part 2 — Execute The Automation Test: implement and execute the test using tools selected.
Online submission deadline: 21 Aug.
Over-the-Weekend Challenge (22–23 Aug, Klang Valley):
Teams present and defend their work products and test outcomes to a panel of industry practitioner judges, followed by a knowledge sharing session.

Who can participate:
— Teams from any Malaysian university
— 1 lecturer + 4–5 undergraduate students per team
— Max 1 international student per team
— Multiple teams per university (subject to approval)

Prizes:
Champion: RM 3,000 + Plaque
Runner Up 1: RM 1,000
Runner Up 2: RM 1,000
Prize-giving at SOFTECAsia 2026, 14 September.

Registration: 1–15 May 2026
Fee: RM 648 per team (inclusive of SST)
In strategic partnership with the Ministry of Higher Education.
Register at https://mstb.org/tdc-2026/
Questions? Email [email protected]

For years, these were separate strategies. Shift-left said: test earlier, catch defects before they compound. Shift-right said: test in production, because some failures only surface under real conditions. Both made sense on their own.

Then they converged — and the test phase disappeared into the pipeline. Dave Farley, co-author of Continuous Delivery, has been saying this for over a decade: "If you have a separate test phase, you're doing it wrong. Testing is not a phase. It's a continuous activity." The data backs him up. The 2025 World Quality Report found that 67% of DevOps teams now practise shift-left testing. Elite performers deploy multiple times per day with lead times in minutes. When your feedback loop compresses that far, the distinction between "building" and "verifying" stops meaning anything.

And then July 2024 happened. CrowdStrike. 8.5 million systems down — not from a software bug, but from a quality failure in the update pipeline itself. It wasn't a testing problem in any traditional sense. It was a process boundary that nobody was watching.

That incident didn't just expose a gap. It redrew the map.
So shift-left met shift-right. Now what? Now testing doesn't have a phase. It has the whole pipeline. And the people working in it need to rethink not just their workflows, but something harder.
Their roles. Their titles. Their identity.
That's where this goes next.