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Updated on 8 October 2026. What’s new: CIS-CPG retired by ServiceNow on 30 June 2025; this guide now covers what holders keep and which credentials replace it.

If you were planning to sit the ServiceNow Cloud Provisioning and Governance exam, stop before you buy anything: ServiceNow retired the CIS-CPG exam on 30 June 2025. The courses behind it retired the same day, and holders' achievements stopped being shown as current in ServiceNow University after 31 December 2025. No new CIS-CPG certificates are being issued.

That leaves two groups of people with real questions. Candidates who were halfway through their preparation want to know where that effort should go now. People who passed the exam want to know what their credential is worth, whether they still have to pay anything, and how to describe it on a CV. This guide answers both, using ServiceNow's own retirement FAQ for the APM and CPG certifications and the final exam blueprint, which ServiceNow still publishes with a retirement notice at the top.

It also keeps something the old version of this page tried to teach: how a governed cloud request works. The exam has gone, but the problem it tested has not. Organisations still need cloud resources to be requested, limited, approved and recorded, and the people who understood that layer are the ones best placed to move on to whatever ServiceNow credential fits their work next.

Plenty of people picture acceptance testing as a few business users clicking through the finished system in the last week before release, which makes a certificate in it look like a tester's badge. The ISTQB Certified Tester Acceptance Testing (CT-AcT) syllabus treats it differently: acceptance criteria are written while requirements are still being shaped, and product owners and business analysts sit the paper alongside testers. It is 40 questions in 60 minutes, with 26 needed to pass.

Is acceptance testing really a last-week activity, and who is this certificate for?

The myth has a grain of truth. Acceptance testing is the level at which a customer or user decides whether a system is ready to be released, and in a strictly sequential project that decision does arrive late. What the syllabus adds is that almost everything which makes the decision sound happens much earlier. Someone has to turn a business need into a requirement, the requirement into measurable acceptance criteria, the criteria into tests, and all of it has to be understood by people who will never read a test script. If that early work is vague, the late test is a formality and the surprises arrive after go-live.

As the demand for project management professionals is high, obtaining certifications like the PMI Disciplined Agile Senior Scrum Master and DASSM certification has become increasingly crucial for career advancement. The certification, offered by the Project Management Institute PMI, validates your expertise in Agile methodologies and demonstrates your ability to lead high-performing Agile teams. However, preparing for the DASSM exam can only be challenging with the right strategy. To help you ace the exam on your first attempt, here are some study tips tailored specifically for the PMI DASSM certification.

What Is the DASSM Certification All About?

DASSM, the Disciplined Agile Senior Scrum Master course, is designed to instruct seasoned agile professionals on effectively utilizing the Disciplined Agile DA toolkit to enhance team efficiency, collaborate with stakeholders within their organization, and tackle complex challenges. This 14 PDU (Professional Development Unit) training program will equip you with the skills needed to pass the DASSM exam and implement Disciplined Agile methodologies promptly in your leadership capacity.

It is Monday morning. The vulnerable items queue has grown overnight, two scanners have reported the same server with different data, half the records carry no asset owner, and the change window closes on Thursday. Deciding what gets remediated first, and being able to defend that order to an auditor, is exactly the work ServiceNow Vulnerability Response automates. The CIS-VR exam asks whether you can configure that decision, not whether you can describe it.

That framing matters, because it explains why candidates who know the theory of vulnerability management still fail. The ServiceNow Certified Implementation Specialist - Vulnerability Response exam is built around configuration choices: which integration brings the data in, which calculator sets the risk, which rule groups the items, which rule creates the remediation task and which target date it inherits. Almost every question is a small version of the Monday-morning problem above.

This guide walks through the exam as an implementation job rather than a syllabus. It covers who the credential is for, the facts you need before booking, the five blueprint domains and their weights, how the data actually flows through the application, a study routine that fits around shift work, the places candidates lose marks, and what the last check before the exam should look like.

CT-ATLaS is for the person who answers for testing across several delivery teams at once, such as a head of testing in a scaled agile programme or a quality coach serving a dozen squads. It is not for a tester inside one Scrum team who wants sharper techniques, or an engineer who builds automation frameworks; ISTQB has other exams for both. The paper is 40 questions in 120 minutes, and you need 47 of 71 points.

Everything below comes from ISTQB's own v2.0 syllabus and its certification page, both read in October 2026. It tells you who should sit the paper, what you must hold before booking, what each of the five chapters asks you to do, and in what order an experienced lead can study. The vendor's wording is quoted where it matters; everything else is explained in plain terms.

Which roles gain from CT-ATLaS, and which should choose another ISTQB exam?

ISTQB describes the certificate as aimed at people who work in an organisation that is pursuing agility at scale or business agility, and who already understand agile and agile testing. Its list of suitable roles is long: Test Manager, Head of Testing, Test Analyst, Quality Engineer, Quality Assurance, Quality Coach, a member of an agile team, a member of the leader group of several agile teams, Project Manager, Release Train Engineer and Scrum Master.