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.

Read about the latest version of the course and what to expect as a Foundations graduate in this blog post.

The course is comprised of 6 lessons, 2 per week. Every lesson is followed by a quiz and an assignment.

Week 1:

Lesson 1: Basic Concepts

Lesson 2: Effective Advocacy: Making People Want to Fix the Bug

Week 2:

Lesson 3: Writing Clear Bug Reports

Lesson 4: Irreproducible Bugs

Week 3:

One-on-one call with your instructor to discuss the assignment (interactive grading)

Lesson 5: Bugs That Could Be Dismissed as Unreasonable or Unrealistic

Lesson 6: Credibility and Influence

Week 4:

Work on the exam questions

Take the exam

Being the second course in the series, we will build on skills you have practiced with in the Foundations course, and also introduce some new areas of focus.

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)

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 others (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.

For this course, as you are accustomed already, you will use multiple resources to study:

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.