Functional testing is often one of the first jobs in one's IT-career and often not for a very long time.
While preparing for this talk, I have interviewed people with really different experiences in functional testing. I have analyzed their feedback and reflected my own ideas with following questions: Why did they start with testing? What kept them doing functional testing? How long do they plan to do it? Why did they change it to other jobs?
There were clear patterns in answers for those questions. Those are motivation, importance of getting feedback, importance of feeling involved and needed in the project, what causes routine and why it may get boring.
The solutions, ideas or answers to some of raised questions and problems can be obvious and at the same time crucial. I would not mind if someone could share the answers with me at the beginning of my IT-career, yet I had to find my own answers.
Now it's time for me to share my experience and ideas and draw a parallel to security testing field:
- How to use curiosity and passion while testing. How to keep testing interesting
- What is the attitude difference between security testing and functional testing
- Which of your reported functional bugs are actually security holes - spiced up with hacking demos.
Please mind, that after listening to this keynote, you might get energized with curiosity, motivation and… paranoia. And you also may want to change your passwords.
