The BBST Video Lectures

The BBST courses are a series of highly complex online classes, designed to help individuals go beyond just understanding the concepts, and gain new skills in software testing. They have a strong theoretical foundation, with highly practical assignments and a great degree of involvement from both the instructors (that give individual feedback on every assignment) to your peers. To fully benefit from the BBST series we recommend registering for our online courses.

The course series has been developed by Cem Kaner and Rebecca Fiedler over a 10-year period. The theoretical lectures for the first 3 courses in the BBST series (version 3.0) are licensed to the public under a Creative Commons Attribution license.  Anyone can use those materials in their academic, personal, or commercial courses without further permission from or royalty to anyone. The letters BBST may not be applied to other black box software testing courses or materials without prior arrangements with Altom Consulting SRL.

BBST Foundations

Lecture 1 - Overview and Basic Definitions

In this first lecture, Cem Kaner presents an overview of the online BBST courses and introduces some definitions commonly used in the testing field.

Lecture 2 - Strategy

In this second lecture, Cem Kaner talks about why testers test, what they are trying to learn, and how they can organize their work to achieve their mission.

Lecture 3 - Oracles

Kaner’s topic for this lecture is how oracles are used as heuristics to help testers determine whether or not software passes the tests that are run.

Lecture 4 - Programming Fundamentals & Coverage

Kaner presents information about basic data handling and storage to help testers think about the multi-dimensional problem of test coverage in more sophisticated ways.

Lecture 5 - The Impossibility of Complete Testing

In this fifth lecture, Kaner explores the complexity of determining when testing is finished and how the goal of complete testing is unattainable.

Lecture 6 - Measurement

In this lesson, Cem Kaner addresses the challenges of measurement in software testing and introduces you to software metrics.

BBST® Foundations

Gain new skills in software testing with help from renowned instructors

Get access to the latest course materials, to valuable assignments and individual feedback by registering to one of our online courses.

BBST Bug Advocacy

Lecture 1 - Basic Concepts

In this 35-minute lecture, Kaner explores a range of definitions for basic concepts including “quality” and “bug.” He also presents the multi-dimensional view of quality used throughout the BBST courses.

Lecture 2 - Making People Want to Fix the Bug

Lecture 2 focuses on how to develop bug reports that clearly communicate bugs in their best and most honest light so that decision-makers can operate with the best possible information.

Lecture 3 - Writing Clear Bug Reports

In this lecture, Cem Kaner introduces the RIMGEN (or RIMGEA) acronym to guide testers in writing better bug reports. We have created a set of printable cards with illustrations for each step of the bug investigation guide. You can download them here.

Lecture 4 - Anticipating and Dealing with Objections: Irreproducible Bugs

In this lecture, Kaner presents strategies to help testers explore non-reproducible bugs so they are reproducible. He also discusses how tracking non-reproducible bugs can help troubleshooting efforts.

Lecture 5 - Bugs that Could Be Dismissed as Unreasonable, Unreaslistic, or Unimportant

This lecture focuses on overcoming objections, by understanding why a bug could be rejected. You will go through a list of reasons why programmers might resist spending time on a bug and how your investigation and reporting efforts can influence this for the better.

Lecture 6 - Credibility and Influence

In addition to the quality of bug reports, a tester’s actions can influence how much credibility and influence they have on a project. This lecture draws on research on bias and signal detection theory to explore some of the things that enhance or diminish a tester’s credibility.

BBST® Bug Advocacy

Gain new skills in software testing with help from renowned instructors

Get access to the latest course materials, to valuable assignments and individual feedback by registering to one of our online courses.

BBST Test Design

Lecture 1 - Function Testing, Tours, & A Taxonomy of Techniques

This lesson provides a structure for organizing your thinking about the many test techniques, and a focus on testing tours and on function testing.

Lecture 2 - Risk-based testing, Testing Strategy, and the Heuristic Test Strategy Model

This lecture introduces risk-based testing (including failure mode analysis and quicktests) and also a few concepts important for developing a testing strategy.

Lecture 3 - Specification-Based Testing

This lecture introduces specification-based testing and suggests eight questions that can guide specifications analysis.

Lecture 4 - Scenarios and Use Cases

This lecture introduces scenario testing, including 17 approaches to creating suites of scenario tests. It also suggests comparing test techniques in terms of their core strengths.

Lecture 5 - Domain Testing

This lecture introduces domain testing, the most popular test technique. The lecture presents a schema for applying domain testing that emphasizes the technique’s roots in risk-based testing.

Lecture 6 - Combination Testing

This lecture focuses on ways to test several variables together, emphasizing combinatorial approaches (such as all-pairs).

BBST® Test Design

Gain new skills in software testing with help from renowned instructors

Get access to the latest course materials, to valuable assignments and individual feedback by registering to one of our online courses.