Bug Advocacy: A BBST Workbook

by Cem Kaner

Bug Advocacy, second in the BBST workbook series, supports students and self-studiers who want a context-driven introduction to black box software testing. Used in parallel with the instructional materials provided at the Center for Software Testing Education and Research (testingeducation.org/BBST), the workbook helps readers understand that 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. Key ideas in this book include:

Defining key concepts (such as software error, quality, and the bug processing workflow)
The scope of bug reporting (what to report as bugs, and what information to include)
Bug reporting as persuasive writing
Bug investigation to discover harsher failures and simpler replication conditions
Excuses and reasons for not fixing bugs
Making bugs reproducible
Lessons from the psychology of decision-making: bug-handling as a multiple-decision process dominated by heuristics and biases and
Style and structure of well-written reports

The learning objectives in this book include this content, plus improving your abilities / skills to:

evaluate bug reports written by others
revise / strengthen reports written by others
write more persuasively (considering the interests and concerns of your audience),
participate effectively in distributed, multinational workgroup projects

Genres: Software

239 pages, Kindle Edition

First published August 10, 2015

About the author

Cem Kaner is a Professor of Software Engineering at Florida Institute of Technology, and the Director of Florida Tech's Center for Software Testing Education & Research (CSTER) since 2004. He is perhaps best known outside academia as an advocate of software usability and software testing.

Prior to his professorship, Kaner worked in the software industry beginning in 1983 in Silicon Valley "as a tester, programmer, tech writer, software development manager, product development director, and independent software development consultant." In 1988, he and his co-authors Jack Falk and Hung Quoc Nguyen published what became, at the time, "the best selling book on software testing," Testing Computer Software. He has also worked as a user interface designer.

In 2004 he cofounded the non-profit Association for Software Testing.