I was lucky enough to attend CAST 2014 last week. CAST is a wonderful conference bringing some of great minds of the testing community together under one roof. Michael Larson has great summaries of the two day conference on his blog. Out of all of the great keynotes, Ben Simo’s talk was probably the most entertaining from a purely geek perspective.
Ben’s keynote, “There Was Not a Breach; There Was a Blog,” shares his experiences visiting HealthCare.gov and the wonderful ways in which the site totally failed. Ben goes in depth into the functionality issues, usability problems, and potential security implications of how the site was implemented. The talk was truly inspirational. Ben captivated everyone in the room, going step by step into what he tried, what he found, and why it’s a problem. Exploratory testing at his finest. My key takeaway from this talk and what really inspires me is this – any one of those testers in that room could do this, too.
If you watch Ben’s talk, he starts off talking about the tools he used. Everything he used is pretty much on your machine already:
- Chrome and IE? Check.
- Developer tools? Check – it’s part of the browsers!
- Fiddler? This was the only ‘special’ tool that had to be installed. And this is free. And if you’re a tester who’s testing a website or app with network connectivity, you should have this on your machine already. Check.
He didn’t have a spec or user stories. He didn’t have source code available. He had no special access to internal builds, log files, etc. He wrote no “automation” or code of any kind to find bugs. Everything he did was public facing using the tools that we all [should already] have. And that to me is inspirational. And it should be inspirational for you, too.
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