All students who sign up for the Bug Advocacy course must have successfully completed the BBST® Foundations course.
BBST® Bug Advocacy is the most important course in the series, helping testers improve the most visible part of their work. You will become a highly effective tester, knowing how to help your team fix the right bugs.
The course will help you to:
- develop technical skills in effective bug investigation, such as troubleshooting failures and isolating failure-producing configurations
- apply different heuristics for design problems versus program failures to easily find compelling arguments for fixing them
- develop skills for drafting persuasive bug reports, learning when and how to use Generative AI to refine them
- understand how people make decisions and how to adapt your work to their biases
- know when to advocate for your bug, and when to stop
You will work on live bug reports of open-source applications where you can actually contribute to the documentation of these bugs.
BBST® Learning Program for Companies
Enroll your team in BBST® classes.
This program is designed for companies that want to build testing capability across a team, not just support individual learning. You can choose public or private classes and workshops, with flexible participant allocation, discounted pricing, included retakes, and insights into your team’s performance in the class.
BBST® BUG ADVOCACY REGISTRATION
Rolling Admission – Start Any Sunday
How It Works
Choose any Sunday to begin your learning journey.
You’ll follow a structured weekly pace while enjoying the flexibility to start when it works best for you. BBST® courses run on a rolling schedule, with new classes starting every week. Once you enroll, stay engaged with the class and submit your assignments, including the final exam, to earn your completion certificate.
Select your Start Date
Prerequisite:
To enroll in BBST® Bug Advocacy, you must have successfully completed BBST® Foundations.
Click on any Sunday to select your preferred start date:
BBST® BUG ADVOCACY COURSE DETAILS
Bug reports are not just neutral technical reports. They are persuasive documents. The key goal of the bug report author is to provide high-quality information, well written, to help stakeholders make wise decisions about which bugs to fix.
This highly interactive, hands-on course involves you in real-life interactions with an open source software project so you can experience a realistic work environment. Then, in the privacy and safety of the course learning environment, you and your classmates will give and receive constructive feedback on your contributions to the open source team.
In addition, you will explore how GenAI tools can support bug advocacy—by refining bug reports.
After this course, you should be able to:
Define key concepts such as software error, quality, and the bug processing workflow (Remember)
Understand and explain the scope of bug reporting – what to report as bugs, and what information to include (Understand)
Recognize bug reporting as persuasive writing (Analyze)
Use GenAI tools effectively to improve bug reporting (Apply)
Investigate bugs to discover harsher and simpler replication conditions (Apply)
Make bugs reproducible (Apply)
Understand excuses and reasons for not fixing bugs (Understand)
Understand lessons from the psychology of decision-making: bug-handling as a multiple-decision process dominated by heuristics and biases (Understand)
Evaluate bug reports written by other testers and GenAI (Evaluate)
Revise/strengthen reports written by others (Analyze)
Write more persuasive bug reports, considering the interests and concerns of your audience (Create)
Participate effectively in distributed, multinational workgroup projects that are slightly more complex than the one in BBST-Foundations (Apply)
By this time you probably are familiar with interactive grading. In case you have not yet opted for it, we encourage you to give it a try.
As Cem Kaner defines it, interactive grading is “a technique that requires the student to participate in the grading of their work”. This provides an opportunity for the students to better demonstrate what they understood from the course material, and to get helpful feedback directly from the instructor on what to improve and how.
We think that interactive grading encapsulates the essence of formative assessment, by focusing on the learning experience of the student, not on the grade. For more info on interactive grading, please read Cem Kaner’s post here.
In the Bug Advocacy course, interactive grading will be performed on an assignment halfway through the course, instead of on the exam. Our aim is to provide students with the necessary feedback to improve their work on the following assignments.
An important note is that during interactive grading, your grade on the exam cannot go lower than in the case of an evaluation where you receive written feedback. The session can only help you demonstrate more knowledge and thus increase your grade. With this weight lifted off from your chest, it is worth mentioning that our focus is on the learning experience during the course, and not on the grade.
the video lectures and slides
the assignments and labs in the Canvas platform
the required and recommended readings
bugs database of an open source software product
The assignments are based on all these resources. This means that you will need to use them all in your learning in order to successfully accomplish the tasks for the course.
BUG ADVOCACY TESTIMONIALS
By making the bug report more efficient, the Bug Advocacy course is transforming ‘I cannot reproduce this issue’ responses into ‘Oh I can fix this’, and ‘This is not worth fixing’ into ‘We probably don’t want more users to experience this’. You get to see and spot the mistakes you’re making in bug reporting but also learn from other peers’ mistakes.
I am happy to have taken this course as it helped me use and write better bug reports, while following a well blended mix of theoretical and practical learning
With BBST® courses (I followed Foundation and Test Design), we always go deeper and talk about the “5th Element”… In this case [the Bug Advocacy course], with Testing bias, we also talked about the human who is behind the Tester, behind the Developer and behind any Stakeholder.
BBST® BUG ADVOCACY INSTRUCTORS
His career is centered around a consistent theme: enhancing the satisfaction and safety of software customers, users, and developers.
Ray Oei is currently CTO at Gamgee Netherlands BV. coaching, mentoring and managing all techies. He has been active in the IT field for over 33 years, of which several years as trainer and coach.
He is a founding member of DEWT (Dutch Exploratory Workshop on Testing) and has been a speaker at several test conferences. He is greatly interested in the human factor of testing as well as the challenges in investigating software in different contexts. He enjoys teaching and helping people learn more about the beauty of testing
Her focus has mostly been on testing mobile applications and embedded systems, as well as on automating game testing, where she is one of the main developers of the open-source AltUnity Tester tool.
She has been a BBST® instructor for over 10 years and she has been working on developing the BBST materials and practical assignments that draw from her past project experiences.
Her focus lately has been on contributing to the testing community. Together with her fellow testers, she organizes monthly meetups in Cluj-Napoca and facilitates events for the Tabara de Testare community.
Whenever he gets free time from his wife and five kids, John enjoys playing guitar, writing songs, and studying theology.
She is currently Principal Quality Engineer at Native Instruments and co-founder of GISCollective.
In her free time, she enjoys programming, reading, and practicing critical thinking skills.