Rebecca Fiedler and I have just completed a major round of updates to BBST, the Black Box Software Testing course. This creates what we consider a stable release.

Current File (2) 2014/10/28 2014/11/12 John Wiley & Sons Information Technology & Software Development Adobe Creative Team. Adobe Press Digital Media. About the Black Box Software Testing Courses. These courses in software testing are available to AST members. We will accept up to 25 students on a first-come, first.

Testing Education. Our mission is to: “Create effective, grounded, timely materials to support the teaching and self- study of software testing, software reliability, and quality- related software metrics.”We are currently (September 2. NOTE: BBST is a registered trademark of Kaner, Fiedler & Associates, LLC. We have posted the instructional materials for these courses and they are available to the public for free. You can teach these courses yourself or modify them and include the modified materials in your own courses for free. When we introduce students to black box testing, our teaching bias is toward exploration. We focus more on confirmation in our work on programmer (glass box) testing and automated black box testing.

The BBST series was primarily developed by Dr. Cem Kaner and Dr. Fiedler, with extensive support from the National Science Foundation, via grants EIA- 0. ITR/SY+PE Improving the Education of Software Testers and CCLI- 0. Adaptation & Implementation of an Activity- Based Online or Hybrid Course in Software Testing and the assistance of several colleagues and students. We update the materials frequently, revising instructional support materials, including labs, assignments and exam questions every semester. The course videos take longer to revise (a full rework takes about 1.

We are working on an interim revision, which we hope to publish in 2. Funding for this maintenance comes from Kaner, Fiedler & Associates (President: Rebecca L. Through Kaner, Fiedler, we’re working on several follow- up projects.

More information on those will appear at bbst. The Association for Software Testing has provided a key testbed for the courses. AST’s volunteer instructors offer these courses to AST members at a low cost. Historically, this has been primarily a training ground for instructors (it’s often been compared to a Barber’s College) and the frequency of courses is limited.

Feedback from AST instructors led to significant improvements in the BBST courses. AST’s Education Special Interest Group runs the AST- BBST courses. Kaner and Fiedler led this SIG for about 5 years. Now that AST has built up a strong BBSTinfrastructure, including a pool of skilled instructors and reliable web hosting, we’ve passed the reins to Michael Larsen, who now manages instructor training, course scheduling and maintenance for AST. At Florida Institute of Technology, we offer the BBST series as an integrated one- semester course (CSE 3. SWE 5. 41. 1). This is a required course for undergraduate and graduate degrees in software engineering. Several other universities also offer courses based these materials.

We’re glad to answer professors’ questions on designing or teaching such courses. High Volume Test Automation: Imagine testing a program with millions of not- necessarily- powerful tests rather than a small collection of hand- crafted, risk- optimized tests. Both approaches are valuable; they hunt different bugs. We believe the high- volume approaches are better- suited to exposing bugs that are hard to replicate, such as problems associated with timing or corrupted memory. We believe these intermittent bugs have resulted in life- critical failures and there is no “traditional” testing technique to expose them. Electrical Installations On Construction Sites. We’re trying to figure out how to teach people high- volume techniques that go beyond the most simplistic variant (fuzzing). Fuzzing is the best- known form of high volume test automation.

Fuzzing generally involves testing a program with randomized (e. The first fuzzer that we’re aware of was the “EVIL” program, used at HP in the 1. The approach was sporadically used in the software industry throughout the 1. Apple). Other high- volume techniques check the program’s behavior against more stringent criteria, looking for data corruption, memory corruption, calculation errors, or other non- crash bugs.

Doug Hoffman and Cem Kaner saw examples of these in industry in the 1. We’ve given a few talks about this, for example in 2. The talks have been too abstract. What we’re doing now is creating reference implementations: open source examples of the application of the techniques. We’ll use these worked examples as the basis of our instruction, initially at a course at Florida Tech in Spring 2. Software Metrics: We often hear claims that 9.

American software companies (or projects) don’t manage their projects using software metrics. Is that because American companies are shiftless, lazy and undisciplined (maybe they could be properly fixed by a few high- priced consultants)? Or is it because the metrics we routinely use in this field are so poorly validated that they often do more harm than good? Sadly, these are easy targets. The challenge is to develop better metrics and that seems to have proven remarkably difficult.

At this point, we’re trying to translate research on metrics validity (and threats to validity) from the social sciences to software engineering. We’re developing courses on.

The law and ethics of reverse engineering. The law and ethics of whistleblowing by engineers about product safety or product- quality- related fraud. How graduate teaching assistants can deal with plagiarism by their students.

How graduate students can deal with intellectual property disputes with their faculty supervisors.