BBST Bug Advocacy from my perspective

BBST Bug Advocacy is the 2nd course served by AST.
After succescfully passing BBST Foundation course, I wanted to participate in the Bug Advocacy. I was quite excited and scared. According to description this course supposed to be harder and more extensive as the 1st one. Indeed these 4 weeks were extremely busy.

Background to the course
During my 5 year of testing, I have never been taught regarding bugs reporting. In each company I was informed only what are the obligatory fields to fulfill in the bug tracking tool, I learned something on ISTQB course but it was still the basics only. I have seen many testers who treat bug reporting as the necessary evil. I have also seen simple bug reports which turned immediately to hard dispute between programmers and testers. That's why I was looking forward for this course because I wanted to improve area where I had definitely lack of skills. This course was designed to improve clearly, unemotional writing and persuasive skills in scope of bug reporting.

Since my first job as a tester I always thought that one and only evidence of my work is the product itself or number of bugs reported (I know the problems involved in using metrics like this :) ) but I never realized that We as Testers are still evaluated by "quality" of our bug reports. How strong our arguments are, how much we help programmers to find and fix problem, how much value we provide with the report or maybe our reports bring to table more vagueness and disrespectful tone only ?


What I liked in Bug Advocacy

- First I had to work on something before I started learning it. In this course I have worked on definitions, I was reporting real bugs for OpenSource project and I was evaluated by others. By Cem Kaner ”You can't learn driving only by reading about it” You work on something, evaluate other’s work and then comeback to your initial thoughts and then try to evaluate yourself to see I you would change anything. Thanks to this approach there is no need to learn something by heart because you can deeply understand everything.

- There is no ready answer, first you have to work on something to understand it. Even knowing one of the definition, you have to prove that you understand it

- This course helped me to understand the diversity of the tester role.

- I realized how often our thinking is biased toward something. Sometimes one little opinion or statement from manger change our behavior and way how we see. See more Signal Detection Theory (I hope I will not be spoiling the course too much).

- I had chance for collaboration and peer review with other students.

What I would’ve changed

- This course was quite intensive. According to the course description it supposed to take 8-10 hours a week - for me it was sometimes 16 hours a week. Even though I would like to be more involved, ask more questions and pay more attention for things I didn’t have time.

- I wish I could translate my thoughts into English text more easily. I think I can communicate well but when it comes to explaining complicated idea with many details I feel I need much more time comparing to native language.

I really enjoyed every lesson from this course. I like to spend time with people who have same passion as me, people who are willing to struggle to gain more experience. I like to be challenged and professionally criticized. In my opinion this is best way to grow in any field - especially in testing. This course helped me also to stay inspired and hungry as a tester. And finally one more time I was reminded that being tester is the ongoing process of learning new things and unlearning some of the obsolete one.

Alek