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Altom organizes BBST® Foundations with Cem Kaner

Kaner, Fiedler & Associates, LLC in collaboration with Altom are offering a new generation of public BBST® courses, starting with the BBST® Foundations in Software Testing course.

Cem Kaner, JD, PhD and Rebecca Fiedler, PhD announce a new venture, KANER FIEDLER & ASSOCIATES, LLC.
Cem Kaner, author of Testing Computer Software and Lessons Learned in Software Testing, offers consulting services in software testing and computer-related law. (Cem’s website)

Rebecca Fiedler, veteran educator and instructional designer , can work with you to develop computer-based or online training in any discipline.

Together, Cem and Rebecca co-developed the popular Black Box Software Testing Online Courses for the National Science Foundation. Now that the National Science Foundation project is coming to a successful conclusion, Kaner and Fiedler are available to bring their expertise to you.

The series contains 3 online classes: BBST® Foundations, BBST® Bug Advocacy and BBST® Test Design.

BBST® Foundations

  • Organized around four critical challenges in software testing:
    • What is the mission of this testing effort and how does project strategy help achieve that mission?
    • How can a tester determine whether or not the program has passed a test?

      • …

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Testing Insights

Activities in testing – a parallel from qualitative research

I mentioned in the previous article that I would discuss more on the similarity of the phases in a qualitative research process and the phases of the testing activity.
So I continue here the parallel with the book – ‘Reliability and validity in qualitative research’, by Jerome Kirk and Marc L. Miller – and a more extended discussion on invention, discovery, interpretation and explanation.

“[…] the full qualitative effort depends upon the ordered sequence of invention, discovery, interpretation, and explanation.” (page 60)

When I test a product, I go through a sequence of different activities that focus on different aspects of the testing process.
 
“Invention denotes a phase of preparation, or research design; this phase produces a plan of action.”

In my case, I could see this as the stage at which I decide how to test a software service/product, by identifying and building a test strategy.

In the book three sub-phases associated with invention are presented, in the case of anthropological research: the first directions to the field to be studied, first look over the field and the first taste of it (meaning the first interaction with the culture to be studied). These further dictate the approach of the research.
I associate this with the experience of learning how to approach the testing task at hand. It’s what happens…

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Testing Insights

Test or be square! – Testing through the lens of a 12 year old

A while back, my mom had mentioned that Dara, my oldest niece, who is about to turn 12 soon, had started a computer science class at school and was having some problems with C++ programming that no one in the family could help her with. So, when I was at home visiting them a few months ago, I asked Dara if she wanted me to see if I can help her with that, and she mentioned she had problems understanding arrays.

We went through what the teacher had told them and I did my best to explain them a bit better and give her some examples, which seemed to have helped. However, I suggested that we try to do one of her homework exercises together and asked her if she had any that we could look at. She told me about this website that is used by students all over Romania (http://campion.edu.ro/) which has programming exercises grouped by age/level and by the topic they cover, and that there are a few there that their teacher had suggested they try if they want to practice the use of arrays. So we chose the first one.

Here’s what it said:

Ana and Maria are playing a game with cards with 5 digit numbers written…

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Testing Insights

Personal explorations of qualitative research in testing

One book I read a while ago from the office’s library is about qualitative research. It’s called ‘Reliability and validity in qualitative research’, by Jerome Kirk and Marc L. Miller.
It sounds fancy and scientific, and it has not been an easy read for me, but I really enjoyed it.
I find it full of great ideas, containing some very consistent examples and discussing ways in which qualitative research can be performed, as well as identifying some really interesting aspects of this approach, with relation to social sciences and anthropology. But I do not intend to review this book.

I’ll try to discuss how I find that some ideas in the book apply to my testing activities. As I read along the pages, I made some thought exercises and tried to identify how my work relates to the ideas presented.

As the title of the book suggests, its framework is given by the reliability problem and the validity problem that arise when performing qualitative research. I instantly related these two problems to…

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Testing Insights

Emacs Python IDE Recipe

My initial goal was to set up Emacs, in the simplest way possible, as a Python development environment that offers basic code browsing and code completion.

This might not be the brightest way to get the job done, and I am open to suggestions, but for now this works just fine for me.

“Ingredients”

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Testing Insights

Help us get to EuroSTAR!

We entered a video competition to win tickets to EuroSTAR 2012! We made a short documentary about the newly discovered testerus sapiens (played by us) as they go about their daily lives. They are presented in their natural habitat, the jungles of software development, where they test software either as a group or alone, living for the thrill of the bug-hunt…

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Testing Insights

How to use an iPhone packaging box to make an iPhone testing sled

While testing an iPhone application that is part of a bigger solution developed by teams in different locations, I came across a few issues that made me look into some of the available options for recording the application in use on a real iPhone and I decided to try to build my own testing sled using parts I already had around the office. It turned out that the original iPhone packaging had everything I needed.

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