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One of my friends was literally hired as an intern to try to break software last year. He loved it, and found a ton of bugs, which was really helpful to the co
by HeWhoLurksLate 7y ago
One of my friends was literally hired as an intern to try to break software last year. He loved it, and found a ton of bugs, which was really helpful to the company- they eventually paid him a $1,000 bonus for his help over the summer.
- noir_lord 7y agoI can believe it, the best person to test software for low hanging fruit of the "What happens if I do this thing that no sane person who knows anything about what the software is supposed to do would do?". It's one of the reasons why I don't trust myself to test things fully, we write the software with all sorts of assumptions in our heads and subconsciously steer away from doing silly things - in that context it's really difficult to aim at a point a zero-knowledge user would hit.
- Izkata 7y agoEven a sane person can find a lot if they never touched the implementation of a specific feature. On one of my teams, we had a hard rule where all features must be tested by 2 other team members (and if multiple people worked on a feature, none of them can be the testers). Something like every other case found something questionable, if not an outright broken edge case, that the developer(s) completely missed.
- QuinnWilton 7y agoI'm been building an API Security Scanner, and one of the things it does is just fuzz every endpoint with garbage in each parameter to look for stacktraces, errors, etc. Moreso than any of the security tests I've written, that fuzzing has broken every enterprise API our customers have thrown at it.
- StavrosK 7y agoI remember I implemented 2FA for a previous company, and our QA person managed to lock himself out of the account while enabling it. I asked him how that's possible, and he said "well I went to enable 2FA, it gave me the recovery codes, then it asked for a 2FA code so I entered one of the recovery ones, but now I ran out". I thought this was so dumb it was brilliant QA.
- mclehman 7y agoI have a friend who does this for free. Every single thing I've ever shown him (both my software and that of others) breaks as soon as he gets his hands on it. He's the sort to dig as far into the internals of things as he can and then start messing with it (he implemented partial function application for C, for example [1]). My poor prototypes never stood a chance. [1] https://github.com/zwimer/C-bind https://github.com/zwimer/C-bind
- pvinis 7y agoThat's so enjoyable to do. :D
- adrianratnapala 7y agoIt sounds like this guys employer has taken first step to inventing QA. There's whole classes of highly paid engineers whose job is to do this. But they work for old fashioned, boring, companies.
- bluGill 7y agoThe problem is QA tends to get to scripted. You need to exercise each corner of the product, thus you test A, B, C in that order - so you never find cases where testing C, A, B breaks, or any other permutation. (to be fair with any complexity it is impossible to test all permutations)
- ebiester 7y agoWe call it exploratory testing.
- adrianratnapala 7y agoThat's one part of it. Another part is hiring a breed of test engineers who like breaking stuff and have a knack for it.