Blog - BBST®

Social Software Testing Approaches

By Maaret Pyhäjärvi maaretp
June 16, 2020
Learning from peers

Software teams, agile teams, in particular, are well aware of the need for their developers, testers, product owners, and other team members to collaborate. The usual selection of agile ceremonies creates space for people sharing the planning of the work: planning meetings, product backlog refinement meetings, three amigos sessions for coming up with acceptance examples, and daily meetings just to mention a few. For much of the rest of the time, people are hunched over their own keyboards and screens, working on their own tasks – more so in the time of forced remote work. Even if developers work with each other doing pair programming, testers often work on their own.

4 things I wish I knew before starting the BBST Foundations course

By Melinda Oprean
April 16, 2020
Course Experience

The BBST Foundations course is a very challenging course, on many levels. For me, it was a full 4 weeks of learning how to learn, how to organize better and how to stay on top of things. This course offers you many learning opportunities and a lot of useful information. In order to benefit from this as much as you can, you’ll need to put effort not only into going through the materials and assignments but also into paying attention to some of the aspects I’m going to describe below.

5 concepts from BBST that will help you create more powerful automated tests

By Ru Cindrea @ru_altom
March 17, 2020
Learning from peers

A lot of projects and companies nowadays no longer have dedicated testers. That doesn’t mean they no longer do testing; they simply share the responsibility of testing inside a development team. Testing becomes an activity that everyone in the team does, but there’s also a strong focus on automation and trying to create large regression suites that cover as much as possible from the overall functionality of the application.

I’ve also seen automated scripts created in several contexts where the people creating them were focused on solving the programming challenges, but they seemed to overlook one key element: how to make their tests powerful. There were lots of hours involved, lots of tools and frameworks, lots of lines of code, but there was little understanding of the application and superficial interest in what the tests will find and cover. So the teams put a lot of effort in creating extensive automated test suites but the question that remained was “Do they bring enough value?”

How should students provide feedback in the BBST Courses

By BBST
January 9, 2020
Course Guide

In each course, you will be asked to review and provide feedback on assignments written by other students. The instructors will monitor your comments and will assign grades. Peer-to-peer feedback is very important in these courses:

It gives you a way to switch roles from creator to evaluator, which will help you more objectively evaluate your own work.
It can help you see opportunities to improve your work, by seeing patterns of problems in the work of other students.
It provides feedback to students from several sources, rather than from one instructor. Peer feedback is more credible to some students than instructor feedback.
Most important, careful evaluation of the questions and comments of other students gives you another type of opportunity to step back from your work and reflect on what the course is teaching.

How do students pass the BBST courses

By BBST
October 4, 2019
Course Guide

Student work in each of the BBST courses will be reviewed and evaluated by the instructors as well as peer-reviewed by other students.

Each course will include several assessments, quizzes, assignments, and an exam. Each assessment has a primary objective. Here are typical examples of what we might be trying to achieve with a specific assignment:

evaluate the student’s performance and make a decision if she/he has successfully completed the course or not yet.
help the student identify strengths and gaps in knowledge and skill
give the student practice working through a specific type of problem or task
help the instructor understand where the course is failing to motivate the students or to help them learn
motivate the students to spend a little more time, effort, or attention on favored tasks

How do students participate in the BBST courses

By BBST
September 13, 2019
Course Guide

Online students attend and participate in classes by logging in to the course web site and participating in the discussions. To succeed online, it is essential that you:

log in to the course several times a week;
read and respond to course-related emails on time;
participate in the course discussions as outlined by your instructor;
complete all assigned work on time; and
ask for help if and when you need it.

Active participation is particularly important in the BBST courses because we have set them up to last three weeks each. If you fall significantly behind, you miss the course.

Live webinar with Ru Cindrea: Lessons Learned from the Worst Bug I Ever Found

By Altom
February 28, 2018
Webinar

Watch the recording of this webinar from March 7, 2018 to learn about Ru’s story of the worst bug she ever found and the lessons learned from this experience. Based on this example she explains the RIMGEN framework, signal detection theory and other bug investigation concepts taught in the BBST Bug Advocacy course. If you’re thinking about taking Bug Advocacy, you will get a good preview of the course contents from this webinar.

You can access the slides here.

Watch other webinars organized by Altom here.

About Ru Cindrea

Ru Cindrea is a senior test consultant and managing partner at Altom. With more than ten years of experience in software testing, she is particularly interested in mobile testing and test automation with a special interest in mobile games. Ru is an instructor in the Black Box Software Testing series offered by Altom in collaboration with Kaner, Fiedler & Associates.

Develop skills in effective bug reporting

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If Ru’s situation sounds familiar, consider improving your reporting skills. The BBST® Effective Bug Investigation & Reporting Specialization teaches you how to use test strategies in your work and get the right bugs fixed, build credibility, and much more.

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Webinar with Cem Kaner: An Introduction to Domain Testing

By Alexandra Casapu
January 8, 2018
Webinar

Watch the recording of the webinar with Cem Kaner from January 4, 2018:

Download the slides here.

Host: Alexandra Casapu

Description of the webinar:

Whether you want to prepare for the upcoming BBST Domain Testing class or you simply want to learn more about domain testing, you are welcome to join this one-hour session.

Cem will discuss:
• what is domain testing
• what it is not
• examples of how to use this technique

We’ll make sure to leave plenty of time for addressing questions from you.

BBST Domain Testing || Jun 9 – Jul 6 2019

Last seats available for this year’s Domain Testing course with Cem Kaner.

Register now >

Sign up at https://bbst.courses/webinar/ if you’d like to get invitations to our future webinars.

How well do you advocate for your bugs?

By Alexandra Casapu
October 21, 2016
Learning from peers

If you do testing, and recognize how cognitively rich the activities involved in testing are, you probably also recognize the importance of testing skills.

On all the projects I’ve contributed to, good testing, deep testing, involved skills. Asking a random person from the street to test on the project would probably not have led to spectacular results (unless, of course, they happen to be an exquisite tester with awesome testing skills!). Developing those skills requires a lot of work.

What to expect from Bug Advocacy: the hands on approach and revisions

By Alexandra Casapu
September 15, 2016
Updates

If you have completed BBST Foundations, congratulations! You can now move on to a more hands-on part of the BBST series, starting with evaluating bug reports in the Bug Advocacy course module.

Compared to Foundations, this module is much more focused on practical exercises. You get to work on live bug reports of open-source applications. You can actually contribute to the documentation of these bugs.

The most appreciated feature of the course is the interactive grading session. In contrast to Foundations, this session happens halfway through the course: you get feedback for an assignment, instead of the final exam. This way, your instructors will provide feedback that you can apply immediately on a subsequent assignment.