BBST Business Benefits

Numerous people have blogged about their experiences doing the BBST Foundations course. I recently wrote a successful proposal for five testers in my organisation to complete the BBST Foundations course in 2014. Below are a couple of generic pieces from the proposal that may help others who need to make a similar request.

The executive summary is largely pulled from the AST website, references are included. The benefits section is a subset of all benefits I had listed, capturing only those that I believe may be applicable across many organisations. Hopefully this post will save somebody time in requesting the testing education of themselves or others.

Executive Summary

The Association for Software Testing offers a series of four week online courses in software testing that attempt to foster a deeper level of learning by giving students more opportunities to practice, discuss, and evaluate what they are learning. [ref] The first of these courses is Black Box Software Testing (BBST) Foundations.

BBST Foundations includes video lectures, quizzes, homework, and a final exam. Every participant in the course reviews work submitted by other participants and provides feedback and suggests grades. [ref]

Too many testing courses emphasize a superficial knowledge of basic ideas. This makes things easy for novices and reassures some practitioners to falsely believe that they understand the field. However, it’s not deep enough to help students apply what they learn to their day-to-day work. [ref]

[organisation] seek deep thinking testers with a breadth of knowledge. The BBST series of courses
is an internationally recognised education path supporting that goal.

Benefits 

The immediate benefits to [organisation], which are realised as soon as the course starts, include:

• Supporting testers who are passionate about extending their learning, which keeps these people invested in [organisation]
• Connecting [organisation] testers with the international software testing community 

In the three months following course completion, the benefits include:

• Re-invigorate participants to think deeply about the testing service they offer 
• Sharing knowledge with the wider organisation
• Sharing knowledge with the market via thought pieces on the [organisation] website 

Within a year, the benefits of this proposal are supported by further investment, including:

• Offer the BBST Foundations course to a second group of participants, to retain momentum for the initiative and continue the benefits above 
• Extend the original BBST Foundations course participants to an advanced topic, to grow the skills of [organisation] testers to deliver high value testing services