BBST Open Course Materials
by Željko Filipin
Courses
In September 2024 a few of us from my team at work started watching videos and reading materials from BBST Open Course. It was created by Cem Kaner and Rebeca Fielder. It was a part of a book club we have been participating in since 2021. Since we started with the course, our team Quality and Test Engineering split into Quality Services and Testing Platform. Members of the book club ended up on both teams.
Regardless of the team split, I have decided to finish the materials. If my memory serves me well, the materials cover similar ground to Testing Computer Software. It was written by Cem Kaner, Jack Falk and Hung Q. Nguyen. Both BBST Open Course Materials and Testing Computer Software have the same main author.
BBST Open Course consists of seven courses. I finished the three main courses.
I might finish other courses in the future.
Each course I have finished has six lessons. Each lesson has a 15-50 minute long video, slides that cover the material from the video, required and optional reading.
The slides are slightly out of date. It was not rare that I have clicked a link in a slide and got an error page.
How I Took the Courses
For the first course, Foundations, I have watched the videos, read the slides and required reading. I have skipped optional reading because there was really a lot of it. Team split happened somewhere around the time I was doing the second course, Bug Advocacy. I lost motivation a bit, but I wanted to finish the course, so I decided to at least watch the videos and read the slides. I have skipped both required and optional reading. I did the same for the third course, Test Design.
I always keep notes while reading a book or doing some big project like this. I wrote many more notes at the beginning for Foundations. I had less notes for Bug Advocacy and just one note for the entire Test Design. I don’t think the quality of lectures decreased. I think it was only my motivation.
While we were all still in the same team, we would meet weekly at our optional office hours meeting and, at least monthly, discuss the book we were reading at the time. I think we did the same for this course. Since the team split, I wasn’t going to the office hours meeting so I lost track of other book club members’ progress. We did meet recently and decided to have one last book club meeting.
Should You Take the Courses?
I think the courses are valuable for anybody that wants to learn more about software testing. They might be more approachable than reading a book. If you’re at all interested in the topic, the simplest thing you could do is watch the videos. You will get some value out of it. Reading the slides adds a bit more value, but I’m not sure it’s worth the time. Reading required reading was really interesting. I didn’t read any of the optional reading, but it could also be good. The list of references at the end of Test Design slides looks interesting.
Probably the best thing would be to take the commercial course with instructors and tests.
Future
Software testing is only tangentially related to what I do on most days. (I develop and maintain a test automation framework. Most days it’s just a lot of JavaScript.) I was participating in the book club since I was in the team that mostly did testing. Now that I’m in a team that’s mostly doing infrastructure, I’ll likely organize another book club, but with a different topic.
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tags: book-club - wikimedia