I recently completed (successfully, I might add) the second of the Association for Software Testing's
all online, free to members Black Box Software Testing course. Each of
these courses is four weeks in length. I've been involved with this
program since years before it became a program, and I am an instructor for the first course in the series, called Foundations. For this course, called Bug Advocacy, I was a student.
Bug Advocacy focuses on the skills and concepts needed to compose
high-quality, easily understood, appropriately compelling and well
organized defect reports. I know, it sounds pretty boring to me too, but
it was anything but boring. These classes are designed so that you
watch recorded lectures (in this class the lecturer is Cem Kaner),
answer some quiz questions (to make sure you watched the lectures),
participate in class discussions, do both individual and group projects
(in this class the project centered around evaluating and enhancing
unconfirmed OpenOffice
bug reports), peer reviewing one another's assignments, and taking a
far-from-trivial closed-book essay exam. All in all, I spent about 40
hours participating in the class over the four week period.
This approach isn't just about writing a good bug report, it's about making sure you do the right testing after you find a bug.
There was one idea in particular from the class that I found
absolutely brilliant and wanted to share with you. Below is actually a
very lightly edited version of my answer to one of the exam questions
asking us to describe a six-factor approach to bug reporting that Cem
remembers using the mnemonic "RIMGEA." If you are a regular reader of
mine, you know that I have a fondness for mnemonic devices, but that's
not what I thought was so great about the approach. What I think is
brilliant is that this approach isn't just about writing a good bug
report, it's also about making sure you do the right testing after you
find a bug to enable you to write a good bug report. Take a look --
you'll see what I mean.
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--
Scott Barber
Chief Technologist, PerfTestPlus, Inc.
About.me
Co-Author, Performance Testing Guidance for Web Applications
Author, Web Load Testing for Dummies
Contributing Author, Beautiful Testing, and How To Reduce the Cost of Testing
"If you can see it in your mind...
you will find it in your life."
