It has been a while since my last post. It was not that I have been procrastinating. No I actually was too busy to write a post. There were many reasons for this and most of them are covered in this post. So lets start with the biggest time consumer.

BBST Foundation

For those who do not know what this is I can almost hear you thinking.

“A foundation course? Doesn’t this guy have enough experience already and now he does Black Box Software Testing Foundation course. ”

Well let me put it this way. There are foundation courses and foundation courses. The Black Box Software Testing (BBST) Foundation course is as it says a foundation for further education and it is a good place to start your testing career. It’s just that it has a distinctive approach to it. First of all it is a four-week online course. Which is longer then almost any other course on software testing. Second it focusses on getting the participants to become critical and thinking software testers. It does this not by handing you any predefined recipe. It gives you the ingredients and the possibility to work with them. Let me, as an example, give you a short overview of the content:

Basic definitions                                              Programming fundamentals and Coverage
What is a computer program                               Numbering
Types of testing                                                   Storage
.                                                                           Representation
Strategy                                                               Data and Control structures
What is testing                                                     Coverage
Testing missions
Testing strategy                                              The impossibility of complete testing
.                                                                           The basic combination rule
Oracles                                                                Paths and sub paths
System under Test                                              Data flows
Heuristics                                                             Sequences
Consistency oracles
More types of oracles                                       Measurement

All captured in :

• 20+ articles and several books to read
• 306 slides
• Over 3 hours of video lecture
• 5 quizzes
• multiple individual and group assignments
• Exam and exam grading
• Over 70 hours of thinking, preparing and answering either individually or with team members from multiple time zones

Given that I also have worked these four weeks and maintained a family life I have made long days in February. But it was all worth it. Even if you have, like me, some experience in software testing it is a splendid (re)sharpener of your critical thinking skills with regard to software testing. Not only with the content of the course itself, but also with the interaction you have with the twenty or so other participants. Especially the group assignments and the assignments that need reviewing each others work give you a good insight in cultural and thinking differences people have. And from this and from the comments you can get a lot of more wisdom.

So some seventy of so hours spent on BBST Foundation. Well on my way towards the end goal of two hundred and fifty. But you might have noticed that this covers only February and this post is written half way March. So what more have I done.

Proposals

The end of February and beginning of March was also the time in which several deadline for calls for papers came in to view. I do not know if this really is considered practice, but it gets you to think and write about software testing anyway. Within one week I entered five proposals for a track and one for a tutorial for EuroSTAR, TestNet spring and autumn event and the Agile Testing Days. And I already am more than happy to tell you that the tutorial on the use of mind maps in testing, that I thought of together with testing buddy Huib Schoots, already got accepted.

But not only did I spent time on my own proposals. Zeger van Hese, this years program chair, invited me to help review some of the many proposals that EuroSTAR has gotten this year. And even if the amount of, anonimized, text is not so much I did want to do a serious review and evaluation of the proposals. (Like I would like others do with mine.) Some of them were good, some were bad and for some I was indecisive.

TestNet book

And there was more time spent reviewing. A couple of months ago I had committed to reviewing the TestNet jubilee book on the future of software testing. Obviously at the time I had not imagined to be this busy. But at the cost of some sleep I managed to finish the review prior to my next challenge.

The book itself is a great reference to over think where testing is going to and what choices you as tester need to make to make yourself both comfortable and future proof the coming five years.

Conferences

Although I have given talks and workshops before I had never been a speaker at a major international test conference. March 14 I made my debut on the international stage at the Belgium Testing Days. As I will be spending a separate post on the content of my talk I will limit for now with the remark that it was great fun to do and that it was great to meet both familiar and new  faces.

Meanwhile during this period Markus Gärtner published an interview with me on his blog as prequel to Europe’s first context-driven testing conference “Let’s Test“. The only downside for me seems to be that I am actually not able to attend, due to a lack of funds.

To complete the conference experience for the coming period I am invited to be a test expert at the Dutch Testing Conference (agile, context-driven testing and exploratory testing) and I invite participants to ask me questions during the conference.