BBST Foundation 2.0

Last year I had a chance to participate in Black Box Software Testing (BBST) Foundation 2.0 online course provided by The Association for Software Testing (AST).

Since I graduated I have attended a few technical courses, 3-day offside courses only, so this was my first experience with an online course. I hadn't had much expectations from that kind of course before, therefore I was kindly surprised how much valuable it turned out to be.

The course lasted for 4 weeks and required from students real work just like in standard live classes. We were working on 5 main topics :

- Information objectives
- Impossibility of complete testing
- Oracles are heuristics
- Coverage is multidimensional
- Measurement is important, but hard.

The number of tasks was enormous. We had tight deadlines - 3,4 tasks every 3 days. There were video, lectures, quizzes, obligatory and recommendation readings, orientation tasks, individual and group tasks. In addition, we were obligated to evaluate one another. It was a lot of work. We had to learn something about testing but at the same time we were improving our communication and collaboration skills. I used to think that to succeed in a course, what you need to have is good remembering skill only (ISTQB - can be good example). In BBST course I really needed to work on the answers, I needed to be involved and thanks to this I could learn something faster and understand it more deeply. I have also realized that there is no best-and-only answer in our field, that everyone has his own meaning for standard vocabulary and we understand same things differently. I have finally understood why complete testing is impossible and how we can test differently when we are given different testing mission.

I must say that I don't remember such hard studying and working on one subject since I graduated.It's hard to describe how much valuable this course was for me.

I strongly recommend this course to everyone who wants to work on his own understating of testing. And if you are done with this Foundation 2.0 there is the next one waiting in line: Bug Advocacy. I look forward to that course. It starts this month

Alek