Black Box Software Testing: Spring 2005
Cem Kaner & James Bach
BBST has been evolving since 1993, with substantial contributions by Hung Nguyen, Doug Hoffman, Brian Lawrence, Bob Johnson, Sam Guckenheimer, Pat McGee, Ajay Jha, and students in about 100 teachings of the commercial version of this course.
The tables below are our project tracking charts. Our public user interface to the course is at this page, not here.
In our tracking chart, we break the course into learning units, track several tasks per unit. Inside a cell:
- A number refers to the draft (first, second, etc.). Several units' slides are past 20th draft. We arbitrarily number longstanding slide sets in good shape as 5th draft, with lower draft numbers for sets that have survived a lot of drafts but aren't yet well polished.
- An item can be designated with P (publicly presented at a conference or a customer site that provided extended feedback), R (peer reviewed), T (taught from in an academic course), E (reviewed by an education specialist), with extent to which it needs change of L (low), M (medium), H (high) and C (we think it is pretty much complete). Thus a mature item might be coded as 5PRTEC.
Click on a status code (such as 5PR) to load the document in its native file format (PowerPoint, Word, Open Office, etc.) Click on [PDF] for the Adobe PDF format. NOTE: Because of incompatibilities between MS PowerPoint on the Mac and Windows, graphics on a few slides will not display on Windows machines. We'll fix these eventually. For now, the correct graphics are available to both platforms in the [PDF] files.
FULL SET OF LECTURE NOTES [PDF] [NOTE: These are the 2004 notes. Go to the relevant section for the 2005 updates. The 2005 files are changing every day.]
Review Questions:
Types of Materials
- Lecture slides. These are the slides we display in class. Because so many versions of PowerPoint have lost or corrupted Slide Notes, we handle instructor notes separately.
- Learning objectives. What we hope students will learn in in this Unit. Some, but not necessarily all, of the objectives are phrased in objective, measurable terms.
- Suggested readings. A list of related papers or book chapters that students interested in this learning unit could consult.
- Articles. These articles are provided at the site or are publicly available and linked from the site. A typical article might be a literature review of the technique (its history, theoretical underpinnings, and application) or a paper (or book chapter) that covers the same ground as a subsection of the slides but in more detail. This is like a textbook chapter that students read to supplement their lectures notes.
- Key examples. These include descriptions of events in real projects that illustrate the technique well, and lab-created examples.
- Instructor notes explain to another instructor why a given approach was taken, how to run certain activities or what to expect during them, what some alternate activities might be, and so on.
- Context notes. A summary analysis of circumstances under which the technique appears to be effective or ineffective, and description of other techniques that work well in conjunction with this one.
- Orientation. A pretest or other activity to orient learners to the issues addressed by this technique.
- Assignments. Homework (simple to complex assignments).
- Class Activity. Description of an in-class lab or seminar
- Factual review.Memorized-concept (basic factual) questions to help learners identify whether they have at least a superficial understanding of the materials.
- Skill drill. Drill-type questions that practice learners on calculations or other applications of the technique.
- Exam questions. Sample exam questions.
- Mastery. Authentic activities that can be assigned to the learner and evaluated by an expert as competent examples of the use of the technique (or not, and if not, what appears problematic).
- Task / skill analysis. A description of the key skills involved in applying the technique.
- Video lecture. A videotape of the full lecture or lectures for the technique.
- Video clips. Short video segments that describe or demonstrate some part of a learning unit. Ideally, a video clip will film someone who has first hand experience with the example.
- Topic links. Links to relevant websites and individual documents that can be reached online.
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