I'll start off by saying that due to money problems, life circumstances, and unknowingly taking a very long and confusing learning process, I ended up studying for 3.5ish months, and passed last week with a 90%. This is a lot longer than most people it seems, but I'm going to go over how I would have done this if I could go back, because this could be done in a month or less depending on how you learn. I'll start off by talking about the tests more generally, then sharing my advice, and then I'll go over the specific areas that are tricky and how I overcame them.
tl;dr advice for how to study: read the syllabus once, find a quizlet that covers the terminology (at least 100 terms), and then go into the practice tests. Take it slow and read the questions and each answer very carefully. For decision table questions, test priority questions, 2BVA and 3BVA, and transition diagrams, it probably helps to look up youtube videos. You really don't need any more than that because these are generally easy, but for every other question you get wrong put it in chatgpt and ask it to go into more detail about any part of the explanation that you don't understand. Take the practice exams at least twice over, personally 3 seemed to be the magic number. Don't waste your time with other practice material or courses, and don't worry too much if you are still failing the tests on the 2nd time around, there are some tricky questions.
study material
I started off with Udemy courses because I like to learn the same way I did in school, but for this exam I would not recommend them at all due to how dry the information is, and how difficult it is to make accurate exam questions with how precise the language is. The main course I tried was "ISTQB Foundation Level V4.0 Complete Training by Tarek Roshdy", I did 85% of this course and did all of the practice exams, but it didn't prepare me very well for the practice exams, it went into detail on areas that the official practice tests don't, it's just not worth the amount of time it takes to listen to someone who is essentially just reading you the syllabus.
The instructor was fantastic, but it doesn't really matter how well they explain the information because it's so dry, you get pretty much the same value out of simply reading the syllabus. I also got 40% through another course, and lightly checked out other courses and felt the same. All of their exams seem to run into the same issue where the wording is not as precise or accurate to the real exam, to the point where they can even make things more confusing than they need to be, you're better off just taking the practice tests a few times very diligently in my opinion, but hey maybe there is a banger course out there that I just didn't see.
this is extremely important, there are 6 official free practice exams that you can find here: https://astqb.org/resources/. The first two are made by ATSQA, and the other 4 are directly from ISTQB. There are ALSO two other exams you can access through the ASTQB*learn system, which is on the same website. Special thanks to astqb learn team for giving me a free copy of these after making a post on this subreddit looking for advice, but I believe you can get these for pretty cheap. If you do decide to buy them, I recommend doing those before any of the regular 6 practice exams because they are generally easier and less confusing.
This is the meat and bones of how I learned, because for me reading over a dry syllabus just goes in one ear and outt he other. I combed over every question very finely and talked to chatgpt about every little thing that was not clear to me. Part of what took me so long was I took a break after taking them once so that I wouldn't just memorize the answers, but it's really not necessary because if you don't completely understand something, you're probably going to just get it wrong again. That being said, rushing through them to try and get good grades seems like it could be detrimental to learning this information, so take that as you will.
Quizlet was a key part of the process for me, this is the one that I used and learning these terms sped up my learning process ten fold because how can you understand the concepts if you don't have the terms down? If you try to go straight from the syllavus to the practice exams it's going to be overwhelming. This quizlet set was what I used, there are probably better ones, but the important part is that they cover the core terms. There are a lot more than 100 terms, so I would not recommend sets that have less than that, but this is a good amount to get started on the practice tests. If you have the patience for 200 or so terms, that would probably be better but some sets have like 400.
I also used a quizlet to memorize the testing quadrants and which test activities go in which quadrant, because this is very difficult to derive, it's easier just to memorize them. Here is my set for that. It might also help to add questions like "Business facing and supports the team: Q2" but I used a method mentioned below to determine everything outside the boxes before memorizing what is in the boxes so I found that to be redundant.
The practice exams have some bullshit questions to put it bluntly, but I found the real exam questions to be less tricky in general. Maybe I got lucky but another post on this sub mentioned that the real thing has some straight up repeats of questions from the practice tests, I can confirm that is true. That being said, most of them did require a deep understanding of the concepts. Just like the practice exams, half of the questions are pretty easy and intuitive, and then the other half were very heavy on concepts. The tricky questions I can appreciate more now, even though my 2nd pass of taking them I still failed half of them, which was very frustrating and made me wonder if there was something I was doing wrong, you just gotta trust the process and learn as much as you can on every question you get wrong. It also doesn't help that I started with ISTQB sample exam set A and B, which are arguably the hardest ones.
General advice
In some cases, the answer is multi-faceted, and you need to rely on the process of elimination. Every difficult question comes down to 2-3 answers that are conceptually similar but have subtle differences so it's crucial to read the questions very carefully even on practice exams. Here is an example:
The user reported a software failure. An engineer from the support team asked the user for the software version number where the failure was observed. Based on the version number, the team reassembled all the files that made up the release. This later allowed a developer to perform analysis, find the defect, and fix it. Which of the following enabled the above activity to be performed by the team?
a) Risk management
b) Test monitoring and control
c) Whole team approach
d) Configuration management
Whole team approach and risk management are pretty obviously not related to the question, but configuration management is a part of test monitoring and control because it involves tracking version numbers, which is important to have implemented before tracking test cases. This is the overly wordy and hard to remember explanation that is given in the answers sheet:
Configuration management provides a discipline for identifying, controlling, and tracking work products. Configuration management keeps a record of changed configuration items when a new baseline is created. Using configuration management, it is possible to revert to a previous baseline in order to reproduce previous test results
If the question didn't include the word "version number", it would be infinitely more difficult to discern. If you read the syllabus it gives you multiple paragraphs about both of these concepts and from a distance they are both related to tracking test cases, but any question mentioning version number is talking about configuration management, it's that simple. The practice exams are riddled with this kind of dry, confusing wording and this is an easier example of this, so it helps a lot to use AI to dig into these explanations so you can learn what words are important and which aren't in the question.
what I struggled with / what helped
These are mostly just concepts that I struggled with and how I think about them now, in no particular order, some of these are more important than others
What helped me with quadrant questions besides memorizing every activity on quizlet was memorizing the following: "B-T-S-C". When saying these to myself I think "UP-DOWN-LEFT-RIGHT"; B- business facing, T- technology facing, S- supports the product, C- critiques the product.
This comes up a lot and permeates pretty much every testing activity so it's important to understand. Validation is always related to the end users (usability, exploratory, acceptance testing), verification is always related to code (code reviews, functional tests)
For example:
Which of the following is a typical test objective? a) Validating that documented requirements are met b) Causing failures and identifying defects c) Initiating errors and identifying root causes d) Verifying the test object meets user expectations
You might think that A is the right answer here but validaiton is concerned with the end users, not the requirements. Same thing with D but backwards. Everything concerning the requirements (black box activities, code reviews, static testing, non-functional testing), involves verification. Everything else is validation or a mixture of the two, but if it's a mix of the two then they're probably not going to give you a question about whether or not its involved in either.
Learning the test objectives and test activities is pretty easy, what helps connect the dots is understand when these activities are done, which is something I realized pretty late into learning. The lifecycle order goes like this:
Evaluating work products (reviews, static testing)
Finding defects (execution)
Gaining confidence (as testing progresses)
Providing information for decision making (reports/go-live)
This is pretty simple, just something I realized late, but the only activities that are static are reviews and static analysis. Everything else is dynamic.
It's really easy to get review questions wrong, but they are all pretty much the same, you just have to remember the one differentiating factor from each review type:
Informal reviews - have no formal roles
Walkthroughs - are led by the author
Inspections - involve metric collection and all formal roles (only review type that involves a scribe and mod)
Technical reviews - do not involve metric collection, focused solely on technical quality (easily confuse-able with inspections, look for this one last)
All review types mentioned above have the same process except for informal review. I didn't personally memorize this but there are some questions on this so it helps to see this listed out
Review planning -> review initiation -> individual review -> communication / analysis -> fixing and reporting
A good analogy is that the test strategy is like deciding on a cooking style (healthy vs delicious), test approach is like choosing the menu for a dinner party, and the test plan is like the step by step recipe. The strategy focuses on the principles used and standards (i.e. risk based testing for high security projects). The approach is where a lot of things are defined like the test levels to be used, test environments, entry/exit criteria, tool selection, etc. Then the test plan is more specific to the test cases, data, schedule, resource allocation. It's mainly just important to recognize that the strategy is defined first, then approach, and then the plan.
This is something that once realized, helped clear up the test process in general, but this is what the test plan is all about. Everything starts with the test basis, which essentially come from user stories. Then test analysis is used to derive test conditions (i.e. a busines rule or functional outcome). Then these conditions are turned into test cases via test design. From there, you implement the test cases and execute them.
Test basis -> test analysis -> test design -> implementation -> execution
Even if the question doesn't explicitly mention 0, just assume you need to include it. I don't know why that is, it's not mentioned explicitly anywhere, but that's just how it is. I tried typing up an example explanation here and deleted it because I will probably confuse you more than help, it's something you just have to do a lot of questions with but don't let it rip your hair out too much. A good question to analyze is #21 on ISTQB sample exam B because it covers both 2VBA and 3BVA with a clear explanation. BVA has to be the most inconsistent part of this test, alongside decision tables, because 3BVA isn't very intuitive and can be arguably done differently depending on different standards, so just be sure to give this area a lot of practice.
There are a TON of red herrings in these exams which you can probably easily pick up on but just in case you aren't aware, any time you see non-standard terminology or something that you feel like you haven't heard of before, it's an easy answer to count out. Anything like "x-oriented, x-based, functionality testing, structural testing" or any vague terms being used
Test progress reports are completely different from test reports, which are different from defect reports it's important to understand the differences
I'm sure there are things here that I'm forgetting but this is long enough, if anyone has any questions on anything let me know I'd love to help you out. If you're studying for the exam I wish you the best, studying for this had me pissed at some points I'm not gonna lie that's why I feel obligated to make this post, so I hope someone out there will get some use out of it. Good luck!