Words From a Purple Mind

I was cleaning out a folder on my machine when I stumbled on an oldie but goodie PDF called “Classic Testing Mistakes” by Brian Marick.

In the paper he states how he breaks the classic mistakes into 5 themes and how to resolve the mistakes:

Security testing is a process to determine that an IS (Information System) protects data and maintains functionality as intended.

The six concepts that need to be covered by security testing are: confidentiality, integrity, authentication, authorization, availability, and non-repudiation.

Test Management tools are very important to any test team. Test teams use these tools to help capture requirements, design test cases, map test cases to requirements, test execution reports and much more. Companies may use one to many tools for this, which range from very expensive to open source. My advice would be to pick a tool that can meet most of your current and near future needs.

It is very important to make sure that your application functions as expected. There may be times that you add one little piece of code and all of a sudden other parts of the application no longer works. You may not have time/capacity to manually go back and regression test all the pieces of your application to make sure they are up to par. Companies use a variety of different testing tools for regression testing. There are lots of tools out there from very expensive to open source.

On 2/1/2009 the Dilbert comic strip had the pointy haired boss telling Asok to create profiles and write positive reviews. This is not a good thing to do. You should not make up ghost/fake profiles just to pump up your product/service. Nor should you write comments that defame your competitors, that’s just wrong. You wouldn’t want your competitors to do it to you.

Creative Chaos has come up with a very interesting testing challenge. The challenge lists out a variety of products and laws. You as a tester need to determine what would you test & why would you test those items.

Here’s the details of the challenge:

Alan Shalloway, CEO and founder of Net Objectives, presented on the lean software development principles and practices and how they can benefit to Agile practitioners during Agile 2008. For those of you that weren’t able to attend (like me) the video is definitely worth watching.