AST Membership and Learning Goals

It’s official I’m a member of the Association for Software Testing or AST as it’s commonly known.

I’ve been meaning to sign up so I can take the BBST Foundations Course, meet some local (or not so local) context-driven testers, perhaps post on their discussion boards and eventually head to CAST (I’m aware you don’t have to join to go).

I’ve been bouncing around the idea of setting up some type of local tester chapter / meet up place where testers can get together, train with each other, perhaps join in a weekend tester session, learn from each other, etc. The problem is I’m not sure how to go about doing it.

In other news I also signed up for Udacity’s Software Testing (CS258) class. I’m not a programmer and it does require Python programming experience so I’m going to focus on getting up to speed before the class. I’m curious as to what they’ll teach although the syllabus gives some hint. Units include:

  1. Introduction
  2. Domains, Ranges, Oracles, and Kinds of Testing
  3. Code Coverage
  4. Random Testing
  5. Advanced Random Testing
  6. Consequences
  7. Conclusion
The mention of Oracles has me interested and so does the “kinds of testing”. I wonder how this relates to Test Techniques? Based on the site description the class seems geared more towards programmers for example unit 4 and 5 are about automatically generating test cases (Random and Advanced Random Testing). Regardless I convinced one of my co-workers (who’s a programmer) to take it with me; I might be able to learn something about testing from the programmers perspective.
If you read my previous post What Testers Need to Learn some of the areas James tells tester’s to understand include Mathematics and Technology. Udacity has an Intro to statistics and quite a few technology classes that could potentially help testers.

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Jamie Larson
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