- Practice testing
- Improve your skills
- Become a better tester
The BBST® course series
Limited number of Early Bird seats available
Use coupon code EB20 at checkout to get 20% off for any individual class.
Use coupon code EB20 at checkout to get 20% off for any individual class.
Altom, in collaboration with Kaner, Fiedler & Associates, LLC, is offering a new generation of Black-Box Software Testing courses (BBST ® 3.0).
We think that testing education is valuable. The shortage of testing education in universities has further motivated us to offer this course. We deliver the course online to make it accessible to as many people as possible. Our online courses give participants the flexibility to adapt the course work to their own schedule and time zone.
We realized that, as testers, we need to keep the learning process fueled. After experiencing the benefits of the BBST courses as students and instructors, we decided to get involved to a deeper level.
We are committed to using the most up-to-date course materials to offer an experience that facilitates enhanced learning through interactive grading, the latests assignments and course workbooks (as they become available).
Course Details:
Fully Online
3 weeks of classes
1 week for exam
Participants who successfully complete the course will receive a Certificate of Completion in digital format. It is signed by all the instructors.
After completing the full BBST series, participants receive a physical certificate, personally signed by all of your instructors.
During the four weeks of each course, you will be interacting with instructors and student peers, expanding your testing skills. These courses are not about grades, they are about learning. Our goal is to support you to learn things that will help you in your work. The courses are designed to help you explore your limits and stretch them.
We are focused on providing you with the tools and environment you need to interact, to collaborate, and to learn. We will use the popular Canvas platform so all of your learning resources are in one place. You can watch video lectures; participate in discussions with others; and receive detailed feedback from instructors. You can also use the mobile app to follow the course from your mobile phone or tablet.
Organized around four critical challenges in software testing:
What the mission of a testing effort is and how the project strategy helps achieve that mission.
How a tester can determine if a program has passed a test.
What key challenges emerge in developing and using software metrics.
How we can measure the amount of testing that has been done and estimate the amount of testing that remains. Also, how we can decide when to stop testing.
Helps develop skills in effective bug reporting. Some of these skills are primarily technical, such as troubleshooting failures and isolating failure-producing configurations.
However, many bugs are left unfixed because they were not presented persuasively. The course applies lessons from sales, psychology and law to help you understand how to present your reports more credibly and more persuasively and how to assess the quality of troubleshooting and communication of reports written by your staff or colleagues.
Our courses teach context-driven testing. Rather than relying on a few “best practices”, we encourage you to adopt the approaches and techniques which are applicable to your project. To do this, you need to know a variety of techniques, with insight into their comparative strengths and blind spots.
Surveying about 75 testing techniques, we emphasize six (function testing and testing tours; risk-based testing; scenario testing; spec-based testing; domain testing; and combinatorial testing). This lays a solid foundation for context-appropriate test planning.
After learning multiple testing techniques in Test Design, in this fourth module we will focus on domain testing, also known as boundary testing or equivalence class analysis.
This course teaches a risk-based approach to domain testing and helps you gain competence in the technique through extensive practice with real-world applications. You will learn to do variable tours, to sample appropriately from secondary dimensions of variables and to imagine relevant tests for results and consequences.
For those of you who want to complete the series, we have a bundle offer: save 25% on Foundations, Bug Advocacy and Test Design when you buy them together.
Domain Testing
TBA
Foundations
25 Feb – 24 Mar
Bug Advocacy
8 Apr – 5 May
Foundations
13 May – 9 Jun
Foundations
24 Jun – 21 Jul
Bug Advocacy
12 Aug – 8 Sep
Test Design
30 Sep – 27 Oct
Foundations
11 Nov – 8 Dec
Cem Kaner is a Professor of Software Engineering at Florida Institute of Technology. He teaches and does research in software engineering, primarily software testing, software metrics, and computer law & ethics.
His career is centered around a consistent theme: enhancing the satisfaction and safety of software customers, users, and developers.
Rebecca Fiedler is an educator and a lifelong learner. She has spent decades teaching students of all ages – from Kindergarten to University. In the testing community, she works with Cem Kaner on the BBST® online professional development courses. She is a regular attendee and presenter at the Workshop on Teaching Software Testing and has had numerous presentations at national and international conferences in education and educational technology.
The courses will take place fully online, with students participating and collaborating using the Canvas online learning platform. Students attend and participate in classes by logging in to the course web site and participating in the discussions. In order to succeed online, it is essential that you:
log in to the course several times a week;
read and respond to course-related emails in a timely manner;
participate in the course discussions as outlined by your instructor;
complete all assigned work on time; and
ask for help if and when you need it.
Active participation is particularly important in the BBST® courses because we have set them up to last four weeks each. If you fall significantly behind, you miss the course. Discussions will usually take place in a Forum, a Glossary, or a Wiki.
By special arrangement, our courses use the latest BBST materials from Kaner, Fiedler & Associates, LLC. These materials are not available in other versions of this course.
Other courses use volunteer instructors. Your tuition allows us to hire experienced, professional instructors dedicated to teaching and coaching students in our classes.
Interactive grading sessions contribute significantly to your learning. If Cem Kaner is an instructor in the course, the first 10 students to register for the course can schedule their interactive grading session with Cem Kaner. Those who register later will schedule their interactive grading session with one of the other qualified instructors.
The courses combine useful theoretical concepts with practical exercises and assignments that are meant to have real impact on your work. Our goal is to support your growth as a tester and encourage you to develop your strengths. We are not interested in teaching theory that you will forget, but in you acquiring knowledge that you will use.
The BBST® instructors will be available throughout the course to help you with the course assignments, give you feedback and answer questions. For each lesson, you will receive comments and guidance from your instructors.
We put great emphasis on providing individual feedback, in order to offer a tailored learning experience.
You will receive a digital certificate, signed by all the instructors, for each course you complete.
Students who complete all of the courses in the BBST® series (Foundations, Bug Advocacy and Test Design) will receive a signed certificate suitable for framing.
Students are expected to spend between 1-2 hours/day on course assignments and studying. The work can be done in smaller chunks every day, even during work hours, which means that you don’t need to be away from your projects for long periods of time to work on the course.
All assignments and all work will be done in English, but we can offer support in Finnish and Romanian whenever you feel you might need help.
Each lesson in the courses will have a specific assignment as well as an online quiz to check your understanding of the materials presented in the lectures.
From the first day of class, you will have access to a pool of exam questions. Practice writing your answers. Review practice answers from other students. Get feedback on your answers and provide feedback to your peers. For the final exam, your instructors will select six questions from the pool of questions. You should be well-prepared to answer any questions they choose.
But, don’t worry too much about the exam. The final decision about whether or not you successfully complete the course also takes into account your overall involvement in the class and the quality of feedback you give to the other students.
We are very excited to be teaming up with Cem Kaner and Becky Fiedler in delivering the BBST courses, and here are some of the reasons for that:
we support Cem financially to update the materials and take the courses further, so that the students can benefit from improved and up-to-date materials.
we involve Cem as instructor in some of our courses, so that more students get access to his vast experience and teaching skills
by teaching the courses along with Cem, our instructors receive direct feedback from him and improve their skills and the value of the feedback they provide to students
our approach is to provide a substantial amount of individual feedback to the students, in addition to the classwide feedback and interactive grading sessions. All these facilitate a personalized learning experience.
we support our instructors financially, to give them the opportunity to develop their skills doing something they love, while being rewarded for their work.
As many of our students are working professionals, we understand that there can be unforeseen events which might prevent you from dedicating enough time to the course in order to be able to complete it. This is one of the reasons we offer the the flexibility of online courses – so you can work on the course when it is convenient for you.
However, in exceptional circumstances, we may be able to offer you a place in a future session of the course, based on availability.
You may pay for the course using one of the following methods:
Once the payment has been completed, your seat in our online course is booked.
If choosing the option to pay by card, the transaction will show on your account with the reference “altom.training”.
Once adding the purchase to the cart, we will send you an order at the email address provided. Please use the order ID to make the payment to the specified bank account. Next, we will send you the invoice by email. After the payment has been cleared by our bank, your registration for the course will be finalized.
You will be given access to the online course platform one day prior to the start of the course.
We will send you the BBST Course Workbook in electronic format.
Registration for an individual course or the course bundle can be cancelled up to 5 business days prior to the start of the course. Subject to this condition, the participation fee will be refunded, less a 10% administrative fee.
If cancellation is made past due time, the participation fee will NOT be refunded, but registration will remain active for any of the future reiterations of the course.
If you fail any of the courses, you can retake them once again for free. This offer is available for 2 years after the first attempt. If you still don’t finish the course successfully, you can pay for that course again at the price on the website and continue with the rest of the courses in the bundle.
If you decide that you don’t want to continue with the course series and there’s nothing we can do to convince you to try again, then we will refund the price of the bundle, minus the courses you have already completed. As a price reference for the completed courses, we will use the price displayed at that moment on the website.
For example, if you don’t successfully complete the BBST Foundations after the first try and you decide to stop:Refund = bundle price – BBST Foundations price on the website.
The same amount will be refunded if you graduate BBST Foundations, but then you don’t want to continue with the 2 remaining courses in the bundle.
If you have graduated BBST Foundations but you don’t successfully complete Bug Advocacy and decide to stop at that point:Refund = bundle price – BBST Foundations price on the website – Bug Advocacy price on the website
Please note that we won’t refund the bundle price if you have registered and paid, but you haven’t attended any of the classes in the 3 year time limit.
Watch the recording of the webinar with Cem Kaner from January 4, 2018: Download the slides here. Host: Alexandra Casapu Description of the webinar: Whether you want to prepare for the upcoming BBST Domain Testing class or you simply want to learn more about domain testing, you are welcome to join this one-hour session. Cem…
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