Course Description: BBST-Bug Advocacy

Basic Information

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 aspects of the content of this course 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.
  • Style and structure of well-written reports

Learning Objectives

Our learning objectives 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 that are slightly more complex than the one in BBST-Foundations

 

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