Chartered IT Professional (CITP) Breadth of IT Knowledge and Technical Foundations Syllabus

Breadth of IT Knowledge and Technical Foundations syllabus — full chapter and topic list

Expand any chapter to see its topics and sub-topics. This is the whole examinable outline for Breadth of IT Knowledge and Technical Foundations in Chartered IT Professional (CITP), not a summary of it.

1. 1

   Software Engineering and Development

   4 topics

   • Software Development Lifecycles
     • Waterfall, iterative and incremental models
     • Agile, Scrum and Kanban delivery
     • DevOps and continuous integration/delivery
   • Requirements and Design
     • Requirements elicitation and specification
     • Architectural and detailed design patterns
     • Modelling with UML and BPMN
   • Quality, Testing and Maintenance
     • Test strategy, levels and automation
     • Code review and static analysis
     • Technical debt and refactoring
   • Programming Paradigms
     • Object-oriented and functional approaches
     • Event-driven and concurrent programming
2. 2

   Systems Architecture and Infrastructure

   3 topics

   • Enterprise and Solution Architecture
     • Architecture frameworks (TOGAF, Zachman)
     • Layered, microservices and event-driven styles
     • Integration and API design
   • Computing Platforms
     • Operating systems and virtualisation
     • Containers and orchestration
     • High-availability and fault tolerance
   • Cloud and Distributed Systems
     • IaaS, PaaS and SaaS models
     • Public, private and hybrid cloud
     • Scalability, elasticity and resilience
3. 3

   Data, Databases and Analytics

   3 topics

   • Data Modelling and Management
     • Relational design and normalisation
     • NoSQL and polyglot persistence
     • Master data and data quality
   • Data Warehousing and Big Data
     • ETL/ELT pipelines and data lakes
     • Distributed processing frameworks
   • Analytics, AI and Machine Learning
     • Descriptive, predictive and prescriptive analytics
     • Machine learning model lifecycle
     • Data visualisation and decision support
4. 4

   Networks and Communications

   3 topics

   • Network Fundamentals
     • OSI and TCP/IP layered models
     • Routing, switching and addressing
   • Enterprise and Wide-Area Connectivity
     • WAN, SD-WAN and VPN technologies
     • Wireless and mobile networking
   • Network Services and Performance
     • DNS, DHCP and directory services
     • Quality of service and capacity

Breadth of IT Knowledge and Technical Foundations flashcards for Chartered IT Professional (CITP)

25 of 55 cards from the Breadth of IT Knowledge and Technical Foundations deck — real questions with worked answers.

1. What are the typical sequential phases of the traditional Waterfall software development lifecycle (SDLC)?

   Requirements, Design, Implementation (coding), Testing (verification), Deployment, and Maintenance — each phase completed before the next begins, with no formal overlap.

2. In SDLC models, how does the Agile/iterative approach fundamentally differ from Waterfall?

   Agile delivers software in short, repeated iterations (sprints) with continuous feedback and evolving requirements, whereas Waterfall is a single linear pass with fixed requirements defined up front.

3. What does the V-Model add to the basic Waterfall lifecycle?

   It pairs each development/specification phase on the left with a corresponding testing phase on the right (e.g. requirements↔acceptance testing, design↔integration testing, module design↔unit testing), emphasising verification and validation throughout.

4. In the Scrum framework, what are the three core roles?

   Product Owner (owns and prioritises the backlog), Scrum Master (facilitates the process and removes impediments), and the Development Team (self-organising group that builds the increment).

5. What is the purpose of a spike, and how does the Spiral model handle risk?

   A spike reduces uncertainty by investigating high-risk technical or requirement questions early through prototyping/analysis before committing to full implementation; the Spiral model explicitly drives each iteration by risk evaluation.

6. What distinguishes functional requirements from non-functional requirements?

   Functional requirements specify what the system must do (features, behaviours, outputs); non-functional requirements specify quality attributes and constraints — how well it must perform, e.g. performance, security, availability, usability, scalability.

7. What is the MoSCoW technique used for in requirements engineering?

   Prioritising requirements into four categories: Must have, Should have, Could have, and Won't have (this time).

8. In requirements engineering, what is the difference between verification and validation?

   Verification asks 'are we building the product right?' (conformance to specification); validation asks 'are we building the right product?' (meeting the user's actual needs).

9. What is coupling and cohesion in software design, and what is the desirable combination?

   Coupling measures interdependence between modules; cohesion measures how focused a single module is. Good design aims for low (loose) coupling and high cohesion.

10. Name the five SOLID principles of object-oriented design.

    Single Responsibility, Open/Closed, Liskov Substitution, Interface Segregation, and Dependency Inversion.

11. What is the distinction between black-box and white-box testing?

    Black-box testing checks behaviour against specifications without knowledge of internal code; white-box (structural) testing exercises internal logic, paths and branches using knowledge of the source code.

12. List the conventional levels of software testing from smallest to largest scope.

    Unit testing, Integration testing, System testing, and Acceptance testing (e.g. UAT).

13. What is regression testing and when is it performed?

    Re-running existing tests after a change (bug fix, enhancement, or new feature) to confirm that previously working functionality has not been broken.

14. What are the four categories of software maintenance defined by ISO/IEC 14764?

    Corrective (fixing faults), Adaptive (changes for new environments), Perfective (improving performance or maintainability), and Preventive (reducing future faults).

15. What is the difference between an error, a fault (defect), and a failure in software quality terminology?

    An error is a human mistake; a fault (or defect/bug) is the resulting flaw in the code; a failure is the observable incorrect behaviour when that fault is executed.

16. What is cyclomatic complexity and how is it calculated from a control-flow graph?

    A metric for the number of linearly independent paths through code, calculated as $M = E - N + 2P$, where $E$ is edges, $N$ is nodes, and $P$ is connected components.

17. Contrast imperative and declarative programming paradigms.

    Imperative programming specifies how to achieve a result through explicit statements that change state; declarative programming specifies what result is wanted, leaving the how to the system (e.g. SQL, functional, logic programming).

18. What are the four pillars of object-oriented programming?

    Encapsulation, Inheritance, Polymorphism, and Abstraction.

19. What characterises the functional programming paradigm?

    Computation expressed as the evaluation of pure functions, avoiding mutable state and side effects, with first-class/higher-order functions, immutability, and often recursion instead of loops.

20. What is the difference between compilation and interpretation of program code?

    A compiler translates the whole source program into machine/byte code ahead of execution; an interpreter translates and executes the source statement-by-statement at run time.

21. In enterprise architecture, what four architecture domains does TOGAF define?

    Business architecture, Data architecture, Application architecture, and Technology architecture (the BDAT domains).

22. What is the core processing cycle (ADM) at the heart of TOGAF?

    The Architecture Development Method — an iterative cycle: Preliminary, Architecture Vision (A), Business (B), Information Systems/Data & Application (C), Technology (D), Opportunities & Solutions (E), Migration Planning (F), Implementation Governance (G), and Architecture Change Management (H).

23. Contrast a monolithic architecture with a microservices architecture.

    A monolith deploys all functionality as a single tightly-coupled unit; microservices decompose the system into small, independently deployable services that communicate over the network, enabling independent scaling and deployment at the cost of operational complexity.

24. What is a service-oriented architecture (SOA) and what typically connects services within it?

    An architectural style structuring an application as loosely-coupled, reusable, network-accessible services with well-defined contracts, often integrated through an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB).

25. What is the difference between vertical scaling and horizontal scaling?

    Vertical scaling (scaling up) adds more resources (CPU/RAM) to a single machine; horizontal scaling (scaling out) adds more machines/nodes and distributes load across them.

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