{"id":21,"date":"2007-10-12T23:45:40","date_gmt":"2007-10-12T23:45:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.satisfice.com\/kaner\/?p=21"},"modified":"2013-01-14T01:51:57","modified_gmt":"2013-01-14T01:51:57","slug":"research-funding-and-advisory-board-for-the-black-box-software-testing-bbst-course","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kaner.com\/?p=21","title":{"rendered":"Research Funding and Advisory Board for the Black Box Software Testing (BBST) Course"},"content":{"rendered":"

Summary: With some new NSF funding, we are researching and revising BBST to make it more available and more useful to more people around the world. The course materials will continue to be available for free. If you are interesting in joining an advisory board that helps us set direction for the course and the research surrounding the course, please contact me<\/a>, describing your background in software-testing-related education, in education-related research, and your reason(s) for wanting to join the Board. <\/em><\/p>\n

Starting as a joint project with Hung Quoc Nguyen in 1993, I’ve done a lot of development of a broad set of course materials for black box software testing. The National Science Foundation approved a project (EIA-0113539 ITR\/SY+PE “Improving the Education of Software Testers) <\/a> that evolved my commercial-audience course materials for an academic audience and researched learning issues associated with testing. The resulting course materials are at http:\/\/www.testingeducation.org\/BBST<\/a>, with lots of papers at http:\/\/www.testingeducation.org\/articles<\/a> and https:\/\/kaner.com\/?page_id=7<\/a>. The course materials are available for everyone’s use, for free, under a Creative Commons license.<\/p>\n

During that research, I teamed up with Rebecca Fiedler, an experienced teacher (now an Assistant Professor of Education at St. Mary-of-the-Woods College in Terre Haute, Indiana, and also now my wife.) The course that Rebecca and I evolved turned traditional course design inside out in order to encourage students’ involvement, skill development and critical thinking. Rather than using class time for lectures and students’ private time for activities (labs, assignments, debates, etc.), we videotaped the lectures and required students to watch them before coming to class. We used class time for coached activities centered more on the students than the professor.<\/p>\n

This looked like a pretty good teaching approach, our students liked it, and the National Science Foundation funded a project to extend this approach to developing course materials on software engineering ethics in 2006. (If you would like to collaborate with us on this project, or if you are a law student interested in a paid research internship, contact Cem Kaner<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

Recently, the National Science Foundation approved Dr. Fiedler’s and my project to improve the BBST course itself, “Adaptation & Implementation of an Activity-Based Online or Hybrid Course in Software Testing<\/a>.” With funding running from October 1, 2007 through 2010, our primary goals are:<\/p>\n