Blog - BBST®

5 thinking errors fixed by BBST® Foundations

By Elisa Szilagyi
March 8, 2023
Course Experience

When you want to join the testing community there are a few things you need to know. Testing is much more than exploring a platform, discovering some supposedly obvious UI errors (e.g. a button that is not working), or working all by yourself. I have to admit that these were some of my thoughts before I started BBST® Foundations. This course was a strong starting point in my career that fixed some of my testing biases, or “thinking errors” as I like to call them.

Here are 5 such thoughts and how they changed after completing BBST® Foundations:

2023 Heads-up: The Inevitable Prices Change

By BBST
February 15, 2023
Updates

[Update September 2023] Aligning the Foundations price with the other BBST® courses helped us maintain the quality of the education materials and offer fair compensation to our instructors. However, we need to increase further all course prices to cover the cost of continuous development. Starting September 26th, 2023 all courses and specializations prices will increase by 18%.

It’s been 8 years since the first people on our team started teaching, promoting, and eventually dedicating much of their resources to updating and developing the BBST® series. They were convinced (and managed to convince others like me) that BBST® can significantly improve the software testing practices of our industry.

During this period, we had some tough lessons to learn, among them being how much time and dedication such a highly valuable training program needs. Fortunately, your feedback kept coming with proof of their impact and inspiring ideas to improve. And so, the answer to the question ”is it worth it?” stayed a firm “yes”.

We started the year analyzing our resources, as most of our service providers increased their prices at the end of 2022 and all of Europe is getting ready for a recession. The conclusion is that we also need to adjust our prices to the current economic situation to continue developing the course series.

The prices change

If you are reading this blog post before March 15, 2023, you can notice that the Foundations course price is lower than the Bug Advocacy or Test Design one. We made an effort to provide it at a discount although the course is as valuable as the others, and although it takes as much time and resources to organize and keep up-to-date. The strategy behind this was to offer an extra incentive for those of you who find it hard to take that first step into the BBST® series.

In today’s economy, we can no longer maintain this discount.

Starting with March 15, 2023, the prices for the Foundations course and the specializations on our website will change as follows:

The BBST® Foundations course will have the same price as the other BBST® individual courses, 750 euros + VAT
The specializations prices will increase while remaining the best offer on our website:
- a 2-course specialization will be 1275 euros + VAT
- a 3-course specialization will be 1800 euros + VAT
- and the complete 4-course specialization will be 2400 euros + VAT

If you are planning on completing a BBST® specialization or individual course, you still have time to register at the discounted price until March 15th, 10:55 am (GTM+2). Tell your community as well, and help us get to those who have the courses saved but need that extra incentive to register ;).

What do I want to know when starting a new project

By Dolores Pente
November 21, 2022
Learning from peers

Starting or moving to different testing projects can be overwhelming. Usually, there is a lot of information to grasp as quickly as you can. Maybe the team is new, the stakeholders are different, and there might be a lot of specification files to read thoroughly.

Since I started my testing career, I have worked on various projects. I’ve joined some of them in their early stages, while others only later. Every new (at least new for me) project started the same way: a lot of meetings with different people from the project loading my brain with too much data.

Were these meetings necessary and useful? Yes!

How testing can be hijacked by common biases

By Dolores Pente
October 13, 2022
Learning from peers

Experimenter effects:
If you WANT to find bugs, you are more likely to find bugs / if you adopt a nicey-nicey attitude and just want to help the programmers demonstrate that their program works, you’re going to miss a lot of bugs. It’s not just that you will not report them. You’ll just not see them.

Cem Kaner, BBST® Bug Advocacy, Lecture 6, slide 168.

We all get biased multiple times in our lives. Biases can take many forms and they can be difficult to overcome especially when we don’t even realize that we might be biased.

A new BBST® official partner: Oose

By BBST
June 6, 2022
Updates

We are happy to announce our new partnership with Oose, a consulting, education, and training company based in Germany. For the past 20 years, they have been offering seminars and workshops, at their customers’ site and the oose.campus in Hamburg’s Schanzenviertelfor.

A few of their trainers approached us wanting to promote the BBST® courses among companies with german-speaking professionals. First, we invited them to take our courses, to ensure an in-depth understanding of the material and our educational method. Second, we talked about ways to make the courses more accessible to the companies they have been working with.

We came up with an interesting and hopefully very useful version for the first course in any of the BBST® specializations: BBST® Foundations.

The BBST® Foundations offered by Oose

It has been over a year of talking, planning, and working together. Now there is a hybrid version of the BBST® Foundations course designed for the german-speaking community.

The materials, method of teaching, grading, and the level of involvement from the instructors, have remained the same as in the courses offered by us. Oose brings two main differences to the course:

Language. The lectures will continue to be in English, but with German subtitles. The assignments will be in German. The instructors will be able to give feedback and interact with the participants in German.
Location. The course will be delivered online with on-site sessions in Hamburg.

The first course organized by Oose will start on the first of July. You can find more details on their site here.

We are very excited about this new partnership and hope that together we can bring the extraordinary skill-building teachings of BBST® to even more IT professionals all over the world.

How has the BBST® Bug Advocacy course changed my work

By BBST
October 4, 2021
Course Experience

We’re starting a new blog series where we interview BBST® graduates and ask them to share their unique perspectives and experiences on a topic regarding the courses or their profession. Our objective is to let you, our readers, have more in-depth answers to the not-so straightforward questions we receive.

For this first blog post in the series, we asked four graduates the following question: How has the BBST® Bug Advocacy course changed your work as a software tester?

3 measurement tips for software quality

By Alexandra Casapu
June 3, 2021
Learning from peers

The BBST Foundations course has a lesson focused on Measurement. The goal of the lesson is to lay the groundwork for understanding how to evaluate a measurement’s validity, and why it’s difficult to measure software quality. When I was a student in the course, the lesson seemed to me more focused on curbing my enthusiasm in terms of applying measures than in providing quick tips for how to start measuring my work in my day-to-day job. After a few years of experience, I appreciate much more the approach of carefully considering how to put measures to question instead of accepting them at face value and jumping to conclusions. At the time I was hoping for some tips that would help me answer some measurement requests and questions with more than “I don’t think that will give us much valuable insight, here’s why”, or “I don’t think that’s a good idea”.

Connecting with the software testing community

By BBST
December 9, 2020
Course Guide

This is a course that pushes you to explore the world outside the boundaries of the course. You test a real-world application writing and evaluating bugs, perhaps contributing to the test plan or other troubleshooting. This gives you an opportunity to build a reputation with people who might help your career later, in many other ways.

There are different opportunities for software testers to interact with people with similar interests:

BBST® Foundations 3.0 – Completely New Design With Content Revision

By BBST
August 12, 2020
Updates

We are proud to announce the first significant update on the BBST® Foundations 3.0 that we are planning to release this year: a completely new design with content revisions for all lectures and assignments.

Back in 2014 we started our collaboration with Cem Kaner and Rebecca Fiedler, convinced that the BBST® series will change the practice of software testing. Our first goal was to make the courses more popular in Romania and Finland, then we committed to promoting them in Europe and now we are devoted to keeping the BBST® series as the go-to courses for advanced skills in software testing worldwide.

Our first online workshop – Introduction to State Model Based Testing

By BBST
July 30, 2020
Updates

Our instructor, Alex Rotaru, has previously organized the Introduction to State Model Based Testing (SMBT) workshop during Autumn Testing Camp and later talked about this concept during a seminar hosted by Cluj IT Cluster. The response and feedback he received after both events were very encouraging which is why we decided to make this workshop available on our platform for any software professional curious to deepen their knowledge on software testing and learn more about the process of test automation.

The concept of SMBT is introduced in both the BBST® Foundations and Test Design courses. Through this workshop, we want to go beyond theory and teach you how to apply it to different scenarios you can come across in your work as a software tester. Learn more about the important issues this workshop will help you solve.