Blog : Foundations

What do I want to know when starting a new project

What do I want to know when starting a new project

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!

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A new BBST® official partner: Oose

A new BBST® official partner: Oose

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.

3 measurement tips for software quality

3 measurement tips for software quality

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”.

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BBST® Foundations 3.0 –  Completely New Design With Content Revision

BBST® Foundations 3.0 – Completely New Design With Content Revision

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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?”

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My Experience with BBST Foundations

My Experience with BBST Foundations

I learned about BBST from several people in the testing community who told me how cool it is and how even if you’re experienced in software testing you will still learn a lot. This and the fact that I don’t have to memorize but instead understand the key concepts got me really intrigued. I’m kind of skeptic around online courses but I felt like I needed to check this one out.

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8 Reasons Why BBST is Not Another Certification Course

8 Reasons Why BBST is Not Another Certification Course

When I started in IT a few years ago, I had no IT education, so I started taking different certificates. BBST Foundations is my fourth one (I already have ISTQB foundation, ISTQB advanced, BCS foundation).

Recently I found a new job as a Senior Test Analyst and my manager really wanted me to pass this training. Based on my experience with certifications, I was quite skeptical at first. BBST seemed to me like another certification without any real value – especially when it is just online.

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Why BBST® Foundations is Not Only For Novice Testers

Why BBST® Foundations is Not Only For Novice Testers

The first course in the Black Box Software Testing series is called BBST® Foundations, but don’t let the title fool you: this course is not only for beginner testers. How would you, no longer a novice to software testing, benefit from taking this course? – To help you find an answer to this question, we have compiled a list – tailored for the experienced tester – of valuable takeaways from the course.

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