Latest Column -- Inspired by taking AST's Bug Advocacy Class

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.

Click here to read the rest of the column

Click here for more information about AST's free-for-members, online training
 
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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."

Testing Lessons From Civil Engineering

Below is the paper I submitted as a prologue to an experience report, discussion, and (hopefully) additional research that I'm presenting for the first time during CAST08:

Engineers don’t look at the world the same way that testers do.  Engineers look at the world with an eye to solving problems.  Testers look at the world with an eye toward finding problems to solve.  This seems logical.  What is less logical is the fact that engineers, and I’m talking about the kind of engineers that deal with physical objects, seem to be much more sophisticated in their testing than testers.  In fact, most of what I know about testing, I learned as a civil engineering student.  We didn’t call most of it testing.  We didn’t even identify it as anything other than “You really want to get this right.” Maybe Civil Engineers test better than software testers because of the motivations to “get it right”.  Consider what happens when a piece of Civil Engineering, like a bridge fails:

Identity crisis or delusions of grandeur?

In this month's installment of "Peak Performance" I discuss the frequently erroneous and often grandiose titles software testers have on their business cards or in their e-mail SIGs. Identity crisis or delusions of grandeur? 
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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."

Performance Testing Guidance for Web Applications book

Some time back, I blogged about a book I’d been significantly contributing to being available as a free .pdf download. (see the entry here)

Well, the book quietly appeared in “dead tree format” (as Stuart Moncrieff put it in his blog post about the book) a couple of weeks ago and I’ve been getting light heartedly scolded by some of my friends and readers for not making a big announcement, so here’s my “big announcement.”

Performance Testing Guidance for Web Applications

by: J.D. Meier, Scott Barber, Carlos Farre, Prashant Bansode, and Dennis Rea is now available on Amazon.

Reviewed by: Alberto Savoia, Ben Simo, Cem Kaner, Chris Loosley, Corey Goldberg, Dawn Haynes, Derek Mead, Karen N. Johnson, Mike Bonar, Pradeep Soundararajan, Richard Leeke, Roland Stens, Ross Collard, Steven Woody, Alan Ridlehoover, Clint Huffman, Edmund Wong, Ken Perilman, Larry Brader, Mark Tomlinson, Paul Williams, Pete Coupland, and Rico Mariani.

The best part is that you can buy the book on Amazon, download the PDF, browse the HTML, or do any combination of the above.

From The Web: "Noncertified IT pros earn more..."

Stop the presses! Can it be true? The industry wants effective, qualified, multi-dimensional people who are capable of understanding business drivers & risk mitigation and applying that in a sapient way to their job as opposed to folks who paid someone to teach them how to pass a multiple-choice exam?!? Amazing!

 

Noncertified IT pros earn more than certified counterparts: survey

 
--
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."