Cem Kaner, J.D., Ph.D.

New Book: Foundations of Software Testing—A BBST Workbook

Rebecca Fiedler and I just published our first book together, Foundations of Software Testing—A BBST Workbook.

Becky and I started working on the instructional design for the online version of the BBST (Black Box Software Testing) course in 2004. Since then,Foundations has gone through three major revisions. Bug Advocacy and Test Design have gone through two.

Our Workbooks mark our first major step toward the next generation of BBST™.

We are creating the new versions of BBST through Kaner, Fiedler & Associates, a training company that we formed to provide an income stream for ongoing evolution of these courses. BBST is a registered trademark of Kaner, Fiedler & Associates.

What’s in the Book

The Workbook includes slides, lecture transcripts, orientation activities and feedback, application activities, exam advice, and author reflections. Here are some some details:

All the course slides

Foundations has 304 slides. Some of these are out of date. We provide notes on these in the Author’s Reflections.

A transcript of the six lectures.

The transcripts are almost word-for-word the same as the spoken lecture. They actually reproduce the script that I wrote for the lecture. In a few cases, my scripts are a little longer than what actually made it past the video edits. We lay the transcript and the slides out together, side-by-side. In an 8.5×11 printed book, this is a great format for taking notes. Unfortunately, it doesn’t translate to Kindle well, so there is no Kindle edition of the book.

Four Orientation Activities

Orientation activities introduce students to a key challenge considered in a lecture. The student puzzles through the activity for 30 to 90 minutes, typically before watching the lecture, then sees how the lecture approaches this type of problem. The typical Foundations course has two to four of these.

The workbook presents the instructions for four activities, along with detailed feedback on them, based on past performance of students in the online and university courses.

I revised, rewrote or added (new) all of these activities for this Workbook. Because, in my opinion, the most important learning in BBST comes from what the students actually do in the class, the new Orientation and Application activities create a substantial revision to the course.

In my university courses, I practice continuous quality improvement, revising all of them every term in response to (a) my sense (and to what ever relevant data I have collected) about strengths and weaknesses that showed up in previous of the course or (b) ideas that have demonstrated their value in other courses and can be imported into this one. Most of the updates are grounded in a long series of revisions that I used and evaluated in my university-course version of BBST.

Two Application Activities

An application activity applies ideas or techniques presented in a lecture or developed over several lectures. The typical application activity calls for two to six hours of work, per student. The typical Foundations course has one to two of these.

One of these is revised from the public BBST, the other completely rewritten.

Advice on answering our essay-style exam questions

The advice runs 11 pages. I also provide a practice question and detailed feedback on the structure of the answer.

I think the advice is good for anyone taking the course, but it is particularly focused on university students who are preparing for an exam that will yield graded results (A, B, Pass-with-distinction, etc.). The commercial versions of BBST are typically pass-fail, so some of the fine details in this advice are beyond the needs of those readers. If you are a university student, I recommend this as a tighter and more polished presentation than the exam-preparation essay included in the public course.

Author reflections

My reflections present my sense of the strengths and weaknesses of the current course, the ways we are addressing those with the new activities, and some of the changes we see coming in the next generation of videos.

Because Foundations is written to introduce students to the fundamental challenges in software testing, some of my reflections add commentary on widely-debated issues in the field. Some of these might become focus points for the usual crowd to practice their Sturm und Drang on Twitter.

Who the Book is For

We want to support three groups with the BBST Workbooks:

• Self-studiers. Many people watch the course videos on their own. The course videos for the current version of Foundations are available for free, along with the slides, the course readings, and the public-course versions of four activities and the study guide (list of essay questions for the exam). The Workbook updates the activities, and provides detailed feedback for all of the orientation activities, and provides several design notes on the orientation and application activities. If you are studying BBST on your own or with a few friends, we believe this provides much better support than the videos alone.
• In-house trainers. If you are planning to teach BBST to staff at your company, the Workbook is an inexpensive textbook to support the students. The feedback for the activities provides a detailed survey of common issues and ideas raised in each activity. If your trainees submit their work to you for review, you might want to supplement these notes with comments that are specific to each student’s work. The comments in the workbook should cover most of the comments that you would otherwise repeat from student to student. The instructors’ reflections will, we hope, give you ideas about how to tailor the application activities (or replace them) to make them suitable for your company.
• Students in instructor-led courses. The BBST Foundations in Software Testing Workbook is an affordably-priced (retail price $19.99) supplement to any instructor-led course. Students will appreciate the convenience of print versions of the course slides and lectures for ongoing reference. Instructors will appreciate the level of feedback provided to students in the workbook.

Buy the Book
Foundations of Software Testing: A BBST Workbook is available from:

• Context-Driven Press
• Amazon
• Your favorite bookseller

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