About the Lab

Our mission is to:

“Create effective, grounded, timely materials to support the teaching and self-study of software testing, software reliability, and quality-related software metrics.”

We are currently working on many projects; several are underway, others in planning. Here are brief descriptions and status reports of a few.

  • Certificate in Software Testing – The Center for Software Testing Education and Research is collaborating with Florida Tech’s Continuing Education Office to offer our first Certificate in Software Testing. This 3-course sequence uses videos and activities developed by CSTER for online courses that are four weeks long. Visit http://fit.bbst.info to learn more or register for classes. Contact us if you’d like more details.
  • Black Box Testing Course: Project lead: Cem Kaner. Today, we publish lecture slides, sample exam questions, many worked examples, and background reading papers on testing and on the teaching of testing. We’re always extending these. In addition, we’ve started creating videotaped lectures and will soon start writing multiple-choice questions and other automatically-gradable questions that students can use to check their own knowledge. All these materials are available to students and teachers anywhere in the world, for free.
  • High Volume Automated Testing: Project lead: Pat McGee. We’re creating an open source framework to support automated random regression testing. We’ll soon start a second sub-project to explore another of the high volume techniques.
  • Software Testing Measurement. Project leads: Walter (Pat) Bond & Cem Kaner. We’re working on measurement theory in general, measurement of testing progress and tester performance, and on the implications of high-volume test results for models of software reliability.
  • Programmer Testing Course: Project lead: Andy Tinkham. This fall marks our fourth teaching of the course. We apply test-first programming (with JUnit), to modify an existing open-source test tool. We also do white box integration testing, using FIT, and API-level testing, writing our own programs in Ruby to test commercial applications through their APIs. The course closes with test-first development of a high-volume-automation test tool.
  • Exploratory Testing: Project Lead: Andy Tinkham. We’re particularly interested in the psychological aspects of exploration, including cognitive theory, education theory, and characteristics of the individual.
  • Failure Mode Catalogs: Project Lead: Cem Kaner. Two catalogs have been developed so far, one in a thesis and papers by Giri Vijayarahavan, another in a thesis under development by Ajay Jha. Our next step is to research the extent to which materials like these can help novice testers and (more likely) experienced testers who are new to their current type of application.
  • Test Techniques: Project Lead: Cem Kaner. Our primary areas of work are domain testing (our most recent work was a Master’s project by Sowmya Padmanabhan), scenario testing, and risk-based testing (especially failure-mode analysis).
  • Procedural Instruction. Project Lead: Cem Kaner. Many computer manuals provide step-by-step examples but very little explanation. They help you do the exact task, but people don’t generalize well from them. Research on mathematics education suggests that this is a poor way to teach people technical material. We’ve been learning the same lesson (the hard way) in testing education. We’ve made three false starts on this topic and are rethinking our research strategy.