Bug Advocacy in the Time of Agile and Automation recording available on demand Join our webinar live to find out how to get the right bugs fixed in this age of agile and automation. Classes in Jan 30 — Feb Test Design. Mar 13 — Apr May 01 — May Bug Advocacy. Jun 12 — Jul Sep 04 — Oct Oct 09 — Nov Nov 06 — Dec Content owners. What are the course logistics? How are these courses different from other testing courses? Here are the main aspects that differentiate our courses from others on software testing: they are specially designed for online learning; there is an in-depth level of learning — participants practice, discuss and evaluate what they are learning; they are practical, based on real-life issues faced by IT professionals; participants receive individual feedback on every assignment from the instructors; there will be an interactive grading of your final exam, a session with one of the instructors; there are small groups of students, making it possible to interact with everyone as in a face to face class; instructors have over 15 years of experience in the field.
How will the instructors help me? Will I get a certification if I complete the course? How much time am I expected to dedicate to a course? What is the courses language? How am I evaluated? What am I paying for? What if I cannot complete a course? What are the course payment options? Visa, Maestro and MasterCard are accepted. Pay by Direct Bank Transfer. What happens once I've registered for the course? You will be given access to the online course platform one day prior to the start of the course.
What are the cancellation and refund policies? What happens if you do not successfully complete one or more of the courses in the bundle? My dissertation was in the area of psychophysics—the measurement of perceptual experiences.
I did some work on the human factors of computing and have since worked as a user interface designer and programmer. My undergraduate work Brock University, was primarily in mathematics and philosophy. Kaner: Actually, the hobbies and passions of each person will always be different. Some people find the testing field interesting, but others discover their own skills are more in line with programming. Those who prefer to focus on solving a problem or specific solutions may be appropriate as a programmer.
But if you decide you want to become a tester, you should do your best to make this happen by studying hard and doing serious research. Your email address will not be published. He is perhaps best known outside academia as an advocate of software usability and software testing. Cem Kaner.
The Related Post. A mind map is a diagram used to visually organize information. It can be called a visual thinking tool. A mind map allows complex information to be presented in a simplified visual format. A mind map is created around a single How Google Tests Software. Having developed software for nearly fifteen years, I remember the dark days before testing was all the rage and the large number of bugs that had to be arduously found and fixed manually.
The next step was nervously releasing the code without the safety net of a test bed and having no idea if one However, there were some insurmountable problems:. I forget his exact words, but Mike laid out an important criterion early in the project. But that was not abandonment of the idea of a better certification.
In parallel with the Open Certification project, I was transforming BBST from a purely academic course to a very student-challenging industrial course. We used multiple-choice as a tutorial tool, not as the core examiner.
BBST demanded a much higher level of knowledge and skill than I knew how to get from multiple-choice exams. I concluded that something along these lines was a better way to go. The person who can demonstrate both, mastery of basic training and a competent portfolio gets an advanced certification. Posted in certification 5 Comments ». This is a draft of a proposal to create a more advanced, more credible credential certification in software testing. The core idea is a certification based on a multidimensional collection of evidence of education, experience, skill and good character.
The idea presented here is imperfect— as are the other certifications in our field. It can be gamed— as can the others. Someone who is intent on gaining a credential via cheating and fraud can probably get away with it for a while— but the others have security risks too. This certification does not assure that the certified person is competent— neither do the others.
Even if we agree that this proposed certification lacks the kinds of powers that could be bestowed by law or magic, I think it can provide useful information and that it can create incentives that favor higher ethics in job-seeking and, eventually, professional practice.
It is not perfect, but I think it is far better than what we have now. This credential is based on a collection of several different types of evidence that, taken together, indicate that the certificate holder has the knowledge and skill needed to competently perform the usual services provided by a software tester. Here are the types of evidence. As you read this, imagine that the Certification Body hosts a website that will permanently post a publicly-viewable dossier a collection of files for every person certified by that body.
The dossier would include everything submitted by an applicant for certification, plus some additional material. As part of the application, the applicant for Certification would grant the Certification Board permission to publish all of the following materials. The Certified Tester should have at least a minimum level of formal education. The Certified Tester should have successfully completed a significant amount of practical training in software testing.
Most of this training would typically be course-based, typically commercial training. Some academic courses in software testing would also qualify. A non-negotiable requirement is successful completion of at least some courses that are considered advanced. The Certified Tester should have successfully completed a proctored, advanced, examination in software testing. There is an obvious accreditation issue here. Someone has to decide which exams are suitable and which are advanced.
I am inclined to tentatively define an advanced exam as one that requires as minimum prerequisites a successful completion of a specified prior exam and b additional education and experience. An exam might be separate from a course or it might be a final exam in a sufficiently advanced course. For an exam to be used by a Certified Tester, the organization that offers and grades the exam must provide the Certification Board with a copy of a sample exam. The organization must attest under penalty of perjury that they believe the sample is fairly representative of the scope and difficulty of the actual current exam.
There is a tradeoff between these approaches. This is an important goal. The BBST exams are not focused on this. For certification purposes, we would expect to improve BBST reliability by using paired grading two examiners but this is imperfect. However, in my view of the assessment of cognitively complex skills, I believe the BBST approach achieves greater validity. Complicating the issue, there are problems in the measurement of both, reliability and validity, of education-related exams.
The difference here is not just a difference of examination style. I believe it reflects a difference in ideology. Somehow, the Certification Board will have to find a way to refuse to accredit some exams even though they have the superficial form of an exam.
In general, I suspect that the Certification Board will cast a relatively broad net and that if groups like ASQ and QAI offer advanced exams, those exams will probably qualify.
Professional achievements include publications, honors such as awards , and other things that indicate that the candidate did something at a professional level. An applicant for certification does not have to include any professional achievements. Some decisions will lie in the discretion of the Certification Board. For example, the Certification Board:. The applicant will provide at least three letters of endorsement from other people who have stature in the field.
The letter should provide additional details that establish that the endorser knows the knowledge, skill and character of the applicant well enough to credibly make an endorsement. The applicant will provide a detailed description of his or her professional history that includes at least N years of relevant experience. The candidate must engage in professional activities, including ongoing study, to keep the certification.
We should foresee this as a prelude to creating an enforcement structure in which a Certified Tester might be censured or certification might be publicly canceled for unethical conduct. Somehow, we have to form a Certification Board. The Board will have to charge a fee for application because the website, the accrediting activities, evaluation of applications, marketing of the certification, etc.
This collection of material does not guarantee competence, but it does present a multidimensional view of the capability of an experienced person in the field. It speaks to a level of education and professional involvement and to the credibility of self-assertions made when someone applies for a job, submits a paper for publication, etc. I think the existence of the dossier will discourage exaggeration and fraud by the Certified Tester.
This is not a certification of a baseline of competence in the way that certifications licenses work in fields like law, engineering, plumbing, and cosmetology. Those are regulated professions in which the certified person is subject to penalties and civil litigation for conduct that falls below baseline.
There is broad disagreement in the field about whether such regulations should exist for example, the Association for Computing Machinery strongly opposes the licensing of software engineers while the IEEE seems inclined to support it and the creation of this certification does not address the desirability of such regulation.
This article is a call for discussion. This article follows up an article I wrote last May about credentialing systems.
I identified several types of credentials in use in our field and suggested four criteria for a better credential:. A more detailed draft of this proposal was reviewed at the Workshop on Teaching Software Testing. We did not debate alternative proposals or attempt to reach consensus. The ideas in this paper are not the product of WTST.
Nor are they the responsibility of any participant at WTST. Payson Hall has also questioned the reasoning and offered useful suggestions. To this point, we have been discussing whether these ideas are worthwhile in principle.
We have not yet begun to tackle the governance and implementation issues raised by this proposal. It is probably time to start thinking about that. Posted in certification , education , testing 11 Comments ». Since then, Foundations has gone through three major revisions. Bug Advocacy and Test Design have gone through two.
The Workbook includes slides, lecture transcripts, orientation activities and feedback, application activities, exam advice, and author reflections. Here are some some details:. Foundations has slides. Some of these are out of date. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. Posted in education , testing , Uncategorized 2 Comments ». The overall goal of the series is to improve the state of the practice in software testing by helping testers develop useful testing skills and deeper insights into the challenges of the field.
Today, most people familiar with the BBST courses think of a four-week, fully online course. The courses have gotten excellent reviews. Bug Advocacy and Test Design have had two. The typical instructor-led course is organized around six lectures about six hours of talk, divided into one-hour parts , with a collection of activities. Most of the course time is spent on the activities:. Students in courses taught by unpaid volunteer instructors are more likely to get most of their feedback from the other students.
This was the commercial version of the course taught to people working as testers. Development of the course was significantly influenced by:. In , I decided that if I wanted to learn how to significantly improve the instructional value of the course, I was going to have to see how teachers help students learn complex topics and skills in university. My sense was, and is, that good university instruction goes much deeper and demands more from the students than most commercial training.
Florida Tech hired me in to teach software engineering and encouraged me to evolve BBST down two parallel tracks:. We correctly expected that the two tracks would continually inform each other. Getting feedback from practitioners would help us keep the academic stuff real and useful. Trying out instructional ideas in the classroom would give us ideas for redesigning the learning experience of commercial students. By , I realized that most of my students were doing most of their learning outside the classroom.
They claimed to like my lectures, but they were learning from assignments and discussions that happened out of the classroom. In , I decided to try taping the lectures.
The students could watch these at home, while we did activities in the classroom that had previously been done out of class.
This went well, and in , I created a full set of course videos. I used the videos in my own classes. Back then, it was still hard to find examples of other people doing this. Even though many other people were experimenting with the same ideas, not many people were yet publishing and so we had to puzzle through the instructional ideas by reading way too much stuff and thinking way too hard about way too many conflicting opinions and results.
We summarized our own design ideas in the presentations cited above. A good sample of the literature we were reading appeared in our applications for funding to the National Science Foundation, such as the one that was funded , which gave us the money to pay graduate students to help with evaluation and redesign of the course yielding the current public version. AST incorporated in Perhaps a year later, Rebecca and I decided that the academic version of online BBST could probably be adapted for working testers.
The AST activists at that time were among my closest professional friends, so it was natural to bring this idea to them. We began informally, of course. By this point late , the Florida Tech course was maturing and I was confident in retrospect, laughably overconfident that I could translate what was working in a mixed online-plus-face-to-face university class to a fully online course for practitioners located all over the world.
The result worked so badly that everyone dropped out even the instructors. After a bunch more pilot-testing, I offered the first BBST:Foundations as a one-month class essentially the modern structure in October, AST was our learning lab for commercial courseware. I would try new ideas at Florida Tech and bring the ones that seemed promising into the AST courses as minor or major updates.
This included professors, commercial trainers, managers teaching their own staff how to test, etc. We published the book as a Technical Report a publication method available to university professors so that we could supply it to the public for free. Underlying much of the AST collaboration was a hope that we could create an open courseware community that would function like some of the successful open software communities.
It turns out that this is a very complex idea. It is probably too complex for a small professional society that handles most of its affairs pretty informally. When we acknowledge support from NSF, we are required to remind you that National Science Foundation does not endorse any opinions, findings, conclusions or recommendations that arose out of NSF-funded research.
The full application is available online but it is very concisely written, structured according to very specific NSF guidelines, and packed with points that address NSF-specific concerns. We adopted the new teaching method in Spring after pilot work in Our new approach spends precious student contact hours on active learning experiences more projects, seminars and labs that involve real-world problems, communication skills, critical thinking, and instructor scaffolding [, ] without losing the instructional benefits of polished lectures.
Anderson et al. For most of the material in these classes, we want students to be able to explain it conceptual knowledge, remembering, understanding , apply it procedural knowledge, application , explain why their application is a good illustration of how this technique or method should be applied understanding, application, evaluation , and explain why they would use this technique instead of some other analysis.
Anderson, L. Longman, New York, Bloom, B. Brooks, L. Non-analytic concept formation and memory for instances. Cognition and categorization , Erlbaum, Hillsdale, NJ, , Clark, R. Day, J. Evaluating a web lecture intervention in a human-computer interaction course. Retrieved December 31, Felder, R. Learning and teaching styles in engineering education.
Engineering Education , 78 7. Fintan, C. Firstman, A. A comparison of traditional and television lectures as a means of instruction in biology at a community college. Forsyth, D. American Psychological Association, Washington, D. Gagne, E. The Cognitive Psychology of School Learning. HarperCollins, New York, Hamer, L. A folkloristic approach to understanding teachers as storytellers. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education , 12 4.
Haskell, R. Transfer of learning: Cognition, instruction, and reasoning. Academic Press, San Diego, He, L. Kaner, C. Kaufman, J. When Allport met Freud: Using anecdotes in the teaching of Psychology. Teaching of Psychology , 28 1. Lave, J. Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, England, Lesh, R. Assessment of authentic performance in school mathematics.
Maki, W. Multimedia comprehension skill predicts differential outcomes of web-based and lecture courses. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied , 8 2.
MaKinster, J. Design and implementation of an on-line professional development community: A project-based learning approach in a graduate seminar Electronic Journal of Science Education , Medin, D. Context theory of classification learning. Psychological Review , 85 National Panel Report. Padmanabhan, S. Paris, S. Why learner-centered assessment is better than high-stakes testing.
Project Kaleidoscope. Rossman, M. Successful online teaching using an asynchronous learner discussion forum. Saba, F. Distance education theory, methodology, and epistemology: A pragmatic paradigm. Savery, J. Smith, D. Wanted: A New Psychology of Exemplars. Canadian Journal of Psychology , 59 1. Sveshnikov, A. Problems in probability theory, mathematical statistics and theory of random functions.
Saunders, Philadelphia, Taraban, R. Reading Psychology , 21 4. Van Merrienboer, J. Training complex cognitive skills: A four-component instructional design model for technical training. Williams, R. An extended visit with Dr. Fox: Validity of student satisfaction with instruction ratings after repeated exposures to a lecturer.
American Educational Research Journal , 14 4. If only Target and other retailers had adopted these, we would have less fraud. Apparently, the fault lies with Target. At the time, I was working as a technology-focused lawyer and one of the areas I worked on was electronic payment systems. I published a few papers on this. The issues I wrote about in this and related papers involved the use of public-key encryption systems to guarantee identity.
The same commercial-liability issues were coming up for chip cards, with the same rationale. These systems offered the potential of significantly reducing fraud in consumer transactions. Fraud was seen as a big problem. With these savings of billions of dollars of losses, some credit card company representatives spoke of being able to noticeably lower their fees and interest rates. Unfortunately, some financial services firms and some other folks saw two opportunities here. The proposals to adopt encryption-based identification systems in commerce tied these together.
The proposed laws would:. I think legislation would have easily passed that provided incentives to adopt encryption-based identification. This legislation would have reduced fraud, which would benefit everyone. Well, everyone but the criminals…. Unfortunately, the demand went further. Even if you could prove that you were the victim of identity theft that was in no way your fault, you would still be held accountable for the loss. The result of their inflexibility was opposition to encryption-based payment-related identification systems including chip cards.
One dimension of the opposition was technical—the security of the payment systems was almost certainly less and therefore the risk of fraud that was created by the system and not by negligence of the consumer was greater than the most enthusiastic proponents imagined. Another dimension was irritation with what was perceived as greed and unwillingness to compromise. Instead, we chose to write legislation that accepted a status quo that involved too much fraud, with prospects of much worse fraud to come.
I was one of the people who successfully encouraged the UETA drafting committee to take this less-secure route because there was no politically-feasible path to what seemed like the obvious compromise. We could have done this better.
Instead, we accepted the predictable future outcome that the United States would continue to use insecure payment systems, that would result in ongoing fraud, like the latest attacks on Target, Neiman Marcus, and apparently, according to recent reports at least six other national retailers.
Posted in Uncategorized 1 Comment ». This presentation will consider the design of the courses. The actual presentation will rely heavily on examples, mainly from BBST Foundations, Bug Advocacy, Test Design , from our new Domain Testing course, and from some of my non-testing courses, especially statistics and metrics.
In the education community, a discussion like this would come as part of a discussion of curriculum design. That discussion would look more broadly at the context of the curriculum decisions, often considering several historical, political, socioeconomic, and psychological issues. My discussion is more narrowly focused on the selection of materials, assessment methods and teaching-style tradeoffs in a specialized course in a technical field.
The broader issues come into play, but I find it more personally useful to think along six narrower dimensions:. A course can be called advanced if it builds on other courses.
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