BBST® Bug Advocacy

Bug reports are not just neutral technical reports. They are persuasive documents. The key goal of the bug report author is to provide high-quality information, well written, to help stakeholders make wise decisions about which bugs to fix.

This highly interactive, hands-on course involves you in real-life interactions with an open source software project so you can experience a realistic work environment. Then, in the privacy and safety of the course learning environment, you and your classmates will give and receive constructive feedback on your contributions to the open source team.

Learning objectives

Being the second course in the series, we will build on skills you have practiced with in the Foundations course, and also introduce some new areas of focus.

After this course, you should be able to:

•  Define key concepts such as software error, quality, and the bug processing workflow (Remember)

•  Understand and explain the scope of bug reporting – what to report as bugs, and what information to include (Understand)

•  Recognize bug reporting as persuasive writing (Analyze)

•  Investigate bugs to discover harsher and simpler replication conditions (Apply)

•  Make bugs reproducible (Apply)

•  Understand excuses and reasons for not fixing bugs (Understand)

•  Understand lessons from the psychology of decision-making: bug-handling as a multiple-decision process dominated by heuristics and biases (Understand)

•  Evaluate bug reports written by others (Evaluate)

•  Revise/strengthen reports written by others (Analyze)

•  Write more persuasive bug reports, considering the interests and concerns of your audience (Create)

•  Participate effectively in distributed, multinational workgroup projects that are slightly more complex than the one in BBST-Foundations (Apply)

Recommended background

All students who sign up for the Bug Advocacy course must have successfully completed the BBST® Foundations course.

Course Details

The course is comprised of 6 lessons, 2 per week. Every lesson is followed by a quiz and an assignment.

Week 1:

Lesson 1: Basic Concepts
Lesson 2: Effective Advocacy: Making People Want to Fix the Bug

Week 2:

Lesson 3: Writing Clear Bug Reports
Lesson 4: Irreproducible Bugs

Week 3:

One-on-one call with your instructor to discuss the assignment (interactive grading
Lesson 5: Bugs That Could Be Dismissed as Unreasonable or Unrealistic
Lesson 6: Credibility and Influence

Week 4:
Work on the exam questions
Take the exam

For this course, as you are accustomed already, you will use multiple resources to study:

•  the video lectures and slides

•  the assignments and labs in the Canvas platform

•  the required and recommended readings

•  bugs database of an open source software product

The assignments are based on all these resources. This means that you will need to use them all in your learning in order to successfully accomplish the tasks for the course.

Course fee

TIVIA member price is for person members and also for the staff of company members.

• Price TIVIA member 796,5€ + VAT 24%

• Normal Price Non-member 885€ + VAT 24%

For the TIVIA member price, sign in to your TIVIA account to get the discount code.

If you are not already a member of TIVIA, JOIN NOW (membership fees from 65 €) and pay TIVIA member price for this course!

The BBST® course series 

The BBST® series was created as a sequence of online courses. With a specific educational approach, each course builds on skills introduced in the former. Foundations has the role of introducing the participants to this learning approach, making it possible to successfully complete the Bug Advocacy or/and the Test Design course.  After learning multiple testing techniques in Test Design, participants can complete the fourth module: Domain Testing.

Every course is:

• online and fully flexible so that any working professional can organize their study-time accordingly
  

• organized in 4 weeks, 6 lessons with 2 assignments per week