This was passed on to me via Paul Szymkowiak. Feel free to email me if you are interested in participating in this test for Security Innovation and I will pass on Pete’s contact details.

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Recruiting Beta Testers for Security Guidance System Usability Testing

We’re looking for 50 beta testers for our new application security development guidance system. The testing is focused on usability and asks that testers run through a series of scenarios to qualify the navigation and search mechanisms, and provide feedback on the experience. The duration of the test is two weeks starting 1-Jul-2008.

Requirements for beta testers are that you are a) a software professional, b) comfortable reading & speaking English, c) interested in software application security and d) have a few hours to hammer our product on-line.

As thanks, each tester will receive a free 1 year subscription to all of the content we publish, and a formal invitation to participate on our customer advisory board.

Interested? Know anyone who might be interested? Please contact me.

Well, a new year is upon us, and I’d like to thank everyone who has checked in on my blog this year. As a rough guess, my readership has quadrupled or quintupled this year. Google Analytics gives me a nice perspective on this:

As a personal highlight, I stuck to the blogging commitment I made for myself at the beginning of 2007. This year, I’m hoping to get a little more reference material on the site. This will cover test strategy, testing heuristics and checklists. I’m also going to try and fix the styling on blog entries in the RSS feed.

I came across a few interesting real-world bugs in the last month or so. Without further ado, here they are. I’ve mapped them to some new-year resolutions.

Be discrete

Don’t show people anything you don’t want them to see.

This screenshot came from an online competition. I expect they’re showing me a little more than they expected to. URL hacking is your (testing) friend.

Don’t be negative

This one was interesting. I haven’t had time to investigate, but can imagine a few scenarios:

Finally, the classic. It turns out that the developer of this Sega title didn’t expect anybody to keep playing this tennis game after there was no further reward. Specifically, they didn’t expect anyone to troll through 70 more games of tennis when there was no longer any scope for player development.

The cool part of this bug was that I initially missed it. My points total was at 125, and I played another round. I saw the score go to 126 without realising that the score was actually minus 126. My initial thought was that the developer had simply limited the score to 126 as a maximum. But, like a true tester, I decided to play one more round just to make sure that there was nothing else strange going on. It was then that the score continued its overflowing, and went to minus 121. I had to look really closely to notice the minus sign, as my brain assumed that the dash was simply a separator between the point label and the point value. Pushing further made the bug more obvious. Now to find out if the overflow can overflow into anything important.

Anyone for 65,280 games of tennis?

Jonathan tagged me while we were chatting, so here are my five things you may not know about me (although I know a few readers do):

1. While Jonathan has let slip that I’m a musician, he didn’t mention that I am a failed pop-star wannabe. Our band was the first signing to an Australian Sony subsidiary label, and I quit two weeks before our national tour supporting the winners of a reality-tv band competition. A few months later, colleagues informed me that they were busily denying my existence in online interviews…Ah, the cutthroat world of the music business.
2. I *did* write my first program when I was 10 years old, on an Atari 600XL.
3. My surname is an anglicisation of a francification (if that’s a word) of a Breton name, which roughly translates to ‘Skinner’. Quinert was ‘Le Quiniat’, which was ‘Ar Kignat’.
4. I keep fish. I think the black ghost knife fish may be the coolest fish one can own. Ours is called ‘Hoover’, and anyone who owns one can probably guess why.
5. I started my testing career in video games, as evidenced on mobygames.

Looking at the search engine strings used to get to my site, I just wanted to point out that for some of you, the word you are looking for is ‘Alliteration’. From Wikipedia – “Alliteration is a stylistic device, or literary technique, in which successive words (more strictly, stressed syllables) begin with the same consonant sound or letter”.

My blog is not named after that at all. I was just thinking that on XP projects, Illiteration is what happens when you’re having a bad week…Or if you’re really unlucky, a bad project.

I helped save a life yesterday. It was only a small one, but I felt quite warm and fuzzy anyway…

Perspective is good.

I know I don’t write that frequently, but I have an excuse for the extended break this time – a five week visit to South Korea. I had thought about advertising my absence, but it occurred to me that if there is some criminally minded person paying attention to my blog, they could quite easily find out where I live and rob me of my meagre possessions.

Perhaps I’m just projecting onto my readers…I apologise, but I assume that all good testers are potential criminal masterminds!

There are a few important things I took from my Korean trip -

• I really don’t know much Korean.

• Immersion is a great way to learn.
• The Korean yahoo homepage (www.yahoo.co.kr) isn’t as crazy as I thought it was.
• Korean game testers are different (from the game testers that I know).
• Don’t buy from a Buddhist
• We have great coffee in Australia, but Koreans have Poka-Yoke coffee.
• It is still possible to play arcades for 20c (or less).
• Small differences can keep you on your toes.
• Amusement parks are kind of freaky when you’re the only person in them.
• Don’t touch the windows.
• King Sejong was a smart guy.
• Marrying your wife twice is twice as good.

More on these later…

After extending my stay, I also managed to attend the Korea Game Conference and GStar tradeshow. I think I had expected the audience to be a little more international. See if you can spot the lone caucasian in the crowd here.

I attended the two sessions on testing ” QA Operation and Process by the game producing step”
by SinAe Kim and “Game QA organizing and Process set-up cases”. These presentations described the experiences of a large Internet portal’s game development studio as they attempted to improve the quality of their published games. They test a mix of in-house and externally developed titles.

I was somewhat surprised at the testing approach described, as it seemed quite corporate, and not product-like at all. This is explained to some degree, I believe, by the relative youth of the Korean games industry. Most likely, testing expertise is more easily found in business environments. My impressions from the conference and brief conversation with Sinae suggested that she and her team were learning a great deal about the ways in which the testing processes of banks and other corporates are unsuited to mass-market product development.

The areas on which their testing focused were -

• Specification testing

• Compatibility testing
• Performance testing
• Security/Exploitation/Abuse testing

Interestingly, they don’t do gameplay testing before completing functional testing, whereas it is more commonly performed the other way around. Tune the fundamentals, then fix the bugs.

I must add that I don’t yet fully understand the Korean games market. There is a lot that you can play for free, but I don’t have a full understanding of where all the money comes from.