Bug Advocacy

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