CT - Test Automation Strategy Certification

Updated on 3 October 2026. What’s new: exam fee corrected to USD $199, and Foundation Level is a required entry condition under syllabus v1.0

CT-TAS is the ISTQB exam for the person who decides whether, what and how much to automate, so it asks for judgement rather than code. You get 40 questions in 60 minutes, the paper is worth 49 points and 32 of them pass. Everything is drawn from one syllabus, version 1.0, which was still the current one on ISTQB's own certification page when we checked in October 2026.

Picture the situation the exam is built around. A team has 1,200 manual regression tests, a release every two weeks and a manager who asks whether automation will pay for itself. A tester who can write Selenium scripts does not automatically know the answer. The answer depends on project length, tool licences, test distribution, environments, who maintains the suite and what the reports will be used for. The Certified Tester Test Automation Strategy syllabus covers exactly those questions, and this article walks through them in the order the syllabus does.