Cem Kaner, J.D., Ph.D.Software Engineering Professor and Consumer AdvocateAbout MeBookstoreCoursesPublicationsHomeUpdating BBST to Version 4.0July 15th, 2016 Becky Fiedler and I are designing the next generation of BBST. We’ll soon start the implementation of BBST-Foundations 4.0. This post is the first of a series soliciting design advice for BBST.We’re looking for comments, including criticism and alternative suggestions: We are revising the core topics of BBST-Foundations. This post lays out our current thinking. Some parts are undoubtedly wrong.We’re looking for recommendation-worthy readings. We point students to reading material. Some is required reading (we test the students on it, and/or make them apply it). Other readings are listed as recommended reading or pointed to in individual slides as references. We’re happy to point to good blog posts, white papers, magazine articles and conference talks, along with the usual books and formal papers. Our criteria are simple:Is this relevant?Is it written at a level that our students can understand?Will they learn useful things from it?We probably can’t include all good suggestions, but we do want to point students to a broader set of references, from a broader group of people, than Foundations 3.0.This is a long article. I split it into 5 sections (separate posts) because you can’t read it all in one sitting. The other parts are at:2. Differences Between the Core BBST Courses and Domain Testing3. Learning Objectives and Structure of Foundations 3.0 (2010)4. What We Think Should Change 5. Financial Model & Concluding ThoughtsBackground: What is BBSTSome readers of this post won’t be familiar with BBST. Here’s a bit of background. If you are already familiar with BBST, there’s nothing new here. Skip to the next section.BBST is short for Black Box Software Testing. “Black box” is an old engineering term. When you analyze something as a “black box”, you look at its interaction with the world. You understand it in terms of the actions it initiates and the responses it makes to inputs. The value of studying something as a black box is the focus. You don’t get distracted by the implementation. You focus on the appropriateness and value of the behavior.Hung Quoc Nguyen and I developed the first version of BBST right after we published Testing Computer Software 2.0 in 1993. (The 1993 and 1999 versions are the same book, different publishers.) The course became commercially successful. I cotaught the course with several people. Each of them helped me expand my coverage, deepen my treatment, improve my instructional style, and update my thinking. So did the Los Altos Workshops on Software Testing, which Brian Lawrence, Drew Pritsker and I cofounded, and the spinoffs of that, especially AWTA (Pettichord’s Austin Workshops on Software Testing), STMR (my workshops on the Software Test Managers Roundtable), WTST (Fied