Blog : bug advocacy

How testing can be hijacked by common biases

How testing can be hijacked by common biases

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.  

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How has the BBST® Bug Advocacy course changed my work

How has the BBST® Bug Advocacy course changed my work

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?

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

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.

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How well do you advocate for your bugs?

How well do you advocate for your bugs?

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.

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

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.

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