Month: May 2018

Testing with Naughty Strings in Postman

Testing with Naughty Strings in Postman

Postman is a great tool for exploratory testing and the Big List of Naughty Strings (BLNS) is a great resource for exploratory testing, so I wanted to put the two things together into a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup of tasty test flavor.

Step One: Getting the Naughty Strings

My plan was to use the Collection Runner to put each naughty string into my chosen API parameter. To do that, I would need a list of strings in a csv format. The BLNS repo includes a couple files with the strings encoded as base64, which is necessary for the csv parser, so my first quick and dirty solution was just to cut and paste the strings from blns.base64.json into a text file, slap a header on top and save it as a csv. Continue reading “Testing with Naughty Strings in Postman” →

A Little Agile Night Music

A Little Agile Night Music

From the ages of 9 to 18 I dedicated at least an hour most days to practicing the cello. I was far from a prodigy, but with work, private lessons, and endless nagging by my mother, I was able to achieve a moderately high level of mediocre. Seattle has one of the best youth symphony orchestra organizations in the country and for two years I played in the top level orchestra. I was clinging by my fingernails to the very back of the section, but I was there, nonetheless

It has been 30 years since I played the cello seriously, but I find many parallels between my experiences as a cellist and my career as a software tester. Being in a siloed test team, such as the ones I experienced at Microsoft, is like playing in an orchestra. Ideally, the different sections work in concert towards a shared goal, watching management for cues on where to put the most effort. But there isn’t very much communication between the dev and test teams. At my last Microsoft position, the dev and test teams were on completely different floors, so we didn’t even see each other in the break room. Continue reading “A Little Agile Night Music” →