CTAL-TAE Question #127: Real Exam Question with Answer & Explanation

Your company is about to start a project to replace an old sales and merchandising system with a new version that will be based on modern platforms. The main requirements for the system are: 1. Loading sales data, sent electronically from the stores each evening, into a central database. 2. Producing sales reports for the merchandisers, whose job is to manage stock levels in stores. 3. Producing forecast reports, used to predict future demand for each product, based on a combination of sales history and forecasting parameters. The parameters will be entered by the merchandisers into a browser-based front end and the reports will be produced overnight. The users will be able to retrieve the reports, on screen or in print, via an interactive feature. Requirements 1 and 2 were already met by the old system and will be rewritten in the new system with some minor functional changes. The sales data will, as before, be loaded in an overnight batch run. There have been problems with the old system at peak periods when this run has taken longer than scheduled, so that dependent jobs could not finish before the start of the next working day. The Data Centre manager requires that the new system's overnight batch runs take 10% less time than the old one, including the new reports, to allow time for all jobs to complete. Requirement 3 is new. The functionality provided by the UI will be simple and the Sales & Merchandising manager requires that it be easy to use. The data for testing the reports will be extracted from the old system in production and will be anonymized before use. The system will be developed using an Agile lifecycle with iterations of fixed length; this will be the first full deployment of this methodology, which has just completed a successful pilot. It is a relatively simple development and is expected to be completed in three releases, each taking approximately 2 months. Until now the company has not automated test execution, but the Agile pilot identified this as a critical success factor. You are an experienced TAE and have been recruited to implement test automation and you are now considering what the TAS for this should look like. Which option contains the TWO MOST important considerations in determining the nature of the TAS that will be needed for this project?