The course includes video lectures, quizzes, homework of various kinds, and a final exam. All of the homework, and the exam, are reviewed by instructors, and individual or class-wide feedback is provided.

We have strict deadlines in the course to keep you on track and synchronized with your classmates so feedback from peers is available for everyone. Each week has two deadlines: Wednesday night at midnight and Saturday at midnight. Not in our time zone? That’s no problem at all. Your Canvas classroom calendar will convert the time zones for you.

This is your first course in the BBST® series, and perhaps your first online course. This leads us to mixed objectives. In essence, our goal is to prepare you for the later courses in the series. That includes both foundational content and skills for succeeding in courses of this type.

After this course, you should:

Be familiar with basic terminology and how it will be used in the BBST® courses (Understand)

Be aware of honest and rational controversy over definitions of common concepts and terms in the field (Understand)

Understand there are legitimately different missions for a testing effort. Understand the argument that selection of mission depends on contextual factors. Able to evaluate relatively simple situations that exhibit strongly different contexts in terms of their implication for testing strategies (Understand, Simple evaluation)

Understand the concept of oracles well enough to apply multiple oracle heuristics to your own work and explain what you are doing and why (Understand and apply)

Understand that complete testing is impossible. Improve ability to estimate and explain the size of a testing problem (Understand, Rudimentary application)

Familiarize yourself with the concept of measurement dysfunction (Understand)

Improve your ability to adjust your focus from narrow technical problems (such as analysis of a single function or parameter) through broader, context-rich problems (Analyze)

Improve online study skills, such as learning more from video lectures and associated readings (Apply)

Improve online course participation skills, including online discussion and working together online in groups (Apply)

Increase your comfort with formative assessment (assessment done to help students take their own inventory, think and learn rather than to pass or fail the students) (Apply)

There is no typical background that you need in order to benefit from the course. We have had both university students who were relatively unfamiliar with testing, and working professionals with several years of experience in testing.

Also, this course is not strictly targeted at testers. Managers and programmers who are interested in testing will find the course helpful by getting new insights into the testing process and skills that support it.

For a great learning experience, we encourage you to bring along your curiosity, be open to learning, and generous with sharing your thoughts and experiences.

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.

For this course, you will use multiple resources to study:

the video lectures and slides
the required and recommended readings

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.