Monday Grab Bag: Guest Post, Weekend Testing and Test Design

I received an invitation to do a guest blog post for my friend Devon Smith-Tooley. Devon writes the terrific blog "Everyday QA" and if you are not familiar with it, well, I recommend you get familiar :). My blog post is titled "Who Do You Want To Be Today?" (yes, it's a play on words of an old Oingo Boingo song, just in case anyone out there might wonder ;) ), and it is specifically about me adapting my role as a Sapient, Exploratory Tester and developing the chops necessary to be more development focused (sort of a Software Development Engineer in Test, but not quite. More of a 50/50 split). In any event, please check it out, and if Devon isn't a regular read for you, I recommend adding her to your blog list.


Second, we had an interesting Weekend Testing Americas session this past Saturday. My thanks to Albert Gareev for stepping up and facilitating (again, his second time :) ) so that:

a. I could actually test
and
b. know that we are developing some depth in thje facilitator department.

By having more facilitators, we can offer more sessions and not be dependent on one person's schedule for sessions to occur. Anyway, this session was dedicated to getting a primer in Penetration Testing, and using a tool that allowed for some interesting manipulation of sites. The tool in question is called Groundspeed, and it allows users to make modifications to form fields and other properties on a web form, including hidden fields. We didn't go into depth as to how to do malicious things, but we did see how we could actively and in an Exploratory fashion find ways to change the behavior of the site. Albert posted a great writeup and discussion on his blog. If you'd like to follow along with the session, the experience report is here.


Finally, the pilot of the AST BBST Test Design course officially started yesterday, and therefore a vast majority of my copious free time (he says sarcastically) will be dominated by atively reviewing the content, checking the questions and seeing how well I actually understand the material, while I am helping teach the course (thankfully, Cem is taking the lead on this one, as I'd be *way* out of my league on this without him). This is a survey course, which means that we are basically drinking from a fire hose. It will provide a lot of material, and something in the order of 500 references. The slides for this course are more than Foundations and Bug Advocacy combined. The information is apread out a bit more, too, so that shouldn't sound as daunting (but it's still a lot of material). I'm also working through the course on the side and a bit ahead of the other participants in the hope of catching any issues or areas that might be problematic or vague (plus this way I can say I took the course along with everyone else :) ). Count on the fact that I'll be blogging about interesting aspects about this new class (and I expect there will be a *lot* of them).