BBST Courses

Welcome to the Black Box Software Testing course site.

This site provides Creative Commons-licensed instructional materials (slides and videos) to teach black box software testing. Black box testing is the craft of testing a program from the external view.

We've organized the materials into self-contained sections. Click on the tabs to navigate from section to section.

The first sections correspond to professional development courses taught by the Association for Software Testing. For example, the Foundations tab takes you to materials used in the BBST-Foundations course. We also use these materials in graduate and undergraduate university courses.
The later sections are currently used only in academic courses. We are gradually upgrading these into their own standalone courses.
We frequently update the course materials. The named directories ("Foundations", "Bug Advocacy", etc.) will be stable. However, we will replace files in these directories, sometimes with files that have different names. NOTE: We will probably move some topics out of "Additional" into dedicated folders.

The development of this site has been extensively supported by the National Science Foundation, via grants EIA-0113539 ITR/SY+PE Improving the Education of Software Testers and CCLI-0717613 Adaptation & Implementation of an Activity-Based Online or Hybrid Course in Software Testing.

We are also developing instructor-support materials. The normal path to our instructor training is to take the testing courses through AST or Florida Tech and then apply to be supervised as an instructor-in-training. We provide formal instructor training at the annual Conference of the Association for Software Testing. To be certified as an instructor by AST, you must teach a course under supervision several times and complete the instructor's course.

If you are an experienced instructor and want us to help you incorporate these materials into your courses, please feel free to contact us at BBST-at-kaner-dot-com.

Within reasonable limits, subject to time availability, I am glad to provide free help to teachers at nonprofit colleges and universities. Commercial instructors, companies that want to use these materials in-house, and for-profit universities are welcome to use our slides and videos subject to the usual restrictions of an Creative Commons Attribution license: You must explicitly acknowledge us as the authors and copyright-holders of every slide of ours that you use. There is no charge to use the materials. However, if you want my help or the help of my collaborators or students, we will have to charge a consulting fee.

Your suggestions and bug reports are very welcome. Please contact me at BBST-at-kaner-dot-com.

Cem Kaner, J.D. Ph.D.
Director: Center for Software Testing Education & Research