Ray Parker
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With the advent of technological advancements, it is necessary to sustain the security of technology-enabled networks and applications. That’s why security is essential and we hope everyone out there, agrees with it. If any part of your corporate network is connected to the Internet, the information processed by the corporate will be controlled by hackers and cybercriminals. Cybercrime is one of the most rapidly growing threats around the globe. Without any surprise, organizations today are developing and deploying specific strategies to prevent and fight cyber attacks.
Penetration testing is an indispensable part of ensuring the security of your organization, allowing you to protect vital customer information and to secure your systems from attackers. From the perspective of an organization’s security, compliance, rules, and regulations, penetration testing is considered to be at the heart of an organization. To make sure that penetration testing replicates the real-life attacks, many organizations prefer to acquire the services of external penetration testing companies. Choosing a specific penetration testing service provider is indeed a challenging task.
Here we are exposing 10 essential questions that you must ask a potential penetration testing service provider to make the selection process of a service provider easy.
Are your specialists or organization certified by any legal authority?
Certifications play a vital role in making an individual or organization credible of doing or performing something. Some of the certifications available for the pen testers are; CEH (Certified Ethical Hacker) Accreditation, CISSP (Certified Information Systems Security Professional), CSSP (Certified Cloud Security Professional), OSCP (Offensive Security Certified Professional), LPT (Licensed Penetration Tester) and more. Before choosing a penetration testing service provider, you should have a considerable understanding of the certifications they hold. This will give you a grip on what expertise or skills the vendor can provide and the standards expected from the vendors. It must also be asked from the vendor who will conduct your test, and which certificates are held by the members of the team.
Will you use automated tests or manual tests?
Although you want a penetration testing method that includes both manual methods and tools, most penetration testers use a diverse set of tools to aid them identify potential threats in security. Automation tools are one of the most significant elements of any pen test and are usually utilized to identify powerful threats at the beginning. It is not mandatory for the testers to complete all operations manually to get very effective results-in fact, these tests can help find many threats/vulnerabilities, just like hackers hunt them down. Therefore, it is recommended to look for a penetration testing company that has a comprehensive set of tools that can be used to start the initial phase of penetration testing, but then they turned to manual methods to complete the test.
What types of penetration tests are you proficient in?
While choosing a vendor for the penetration testing services, you must first ask that which types of penetration test a vendor is most proficient in.
Network Penetration Tests - used to test the operations or functions of the network and discover any potential threats in the network itself.
Web Application Testing - This type of pen testing makes sure that your website or web applications are safe from the cyber-attacks and threats
Cloud Testing - it will check the security of your cloud provider and ensure that there is no potential database access.
Wireless Network Testing - With the help of wireless network testing, you can better understand the security of the entire wireless network.
Do you outsource your testing projects?
While working with a penetration testing service provider, it is better to understand who you are working with. It is best to partner with a pen-testing vendor who works on its own rather than outsources it to contractors. Although contractors can be a valuable addition to any business, you don’t necessarily want them to handle the work of pen-testing.
Is there internal security in your company?
It is better to ask your vendor before you hire its services, that whether they do have an internal security system or policy or not because its a matter of providing your sensitive information to a third party. So, it’s better to ensure that the vendor is strictly following security policy.
Conclusion
Make sure that you are asking these questions while screening a penetration testing vendor for your company. Because your whole company’s intellectual and sensitive assets depend upon the credibility of your vendor. We hope that these questions will help you better select a pen testing vendor for your company, according to your needs and requirements.
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Ray Parker
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Over the past decade, applications have drastically evolved in terms of complexity, functionalities, and technologies used to develop them. This has changed the way how an application is tested as testers face increased pressure to get involved in the development process early to find and fix the defects as quickly as possible. To meet tight deadlines and customer expectations, teams have started to implement automation.
As someone who has a lot of experience in QA, I’m often asked about automation and how it can be integrated into the existing manual testing process. People also ask how both manual and automation testing can be used to complement each other and increase overall test coverage.
In this article, I will address these questions in detail and explain how automation can be seamlessly integrated into the existing testing process.
Identify Time-Taking Tasks
Complexity exponentially increases the time needed to test the applications. Some of the examples include setting up test data with different combinations, performing regression and smoke testing, and installing builds from QA servers onto test devices. Identifying these time-consuming tasks is the first step towards integrating automation into existing manual testing processes. These tasks can be automated one step at a time, while testers can spend more time to explore the application.
Limitations of Automation
Everything can’t be automated and this needs to be realized as soon as possible to find the right balance of automation and manual approach. Some scenarios are hard to automate, for example, checking rendering issues in web pages on different screen sizes and browsers, validating login pages with CAPTCHA enabled, and checking whether the right images are displayed in the dynamically changing content. These scenarios need to be tested manually.
Understanding these limitations helps teams save time, costs, efforts, and makes the integration process easier. While testers explore the application through exploratory and risk-based testing, automation can be run simultaneously to ensure that the functionalities of the system are working as expected.
Keep It Simple
Testers need to resist the temptation of automating so many tasks at once without paying attention to whether these tests are stable. This often results in testers executing the automated test scenarios manually. It’s always better to identify small sets of tasks that give high ROI when automated. This could be anything from high-level smoke tests to pre-populating pages with data to help simulate production environments. These tests are then run periodically and evaluated to identify flaky and stable tests. Both of these tests are separated from one another to be fixed one by one before adding them back. This leads to stable automation that integrates with the existing manual testing process.
Build a Technical Skill Set
Finding skilled resources in teams to build stable automated tests is one of the biggest challenges. These resources are also expensive to acquire and a lot of time, effort, and money is required to be invested in this process. Many organizations, especially the startups, can’t afford to hire and build automation teams.
To tackle this problem, teams use alternative approaches to build the required skillset within the company to implement automation. These approaches include training on different test management tools, automation frameworks, and programming languages, having experienced technical test mentors, and sending teams to technical conferences.
Invest in Tools
Writing new test cases and maintaining old ones is the key to having good test coverage. Teams prefer to have a single integrated solution to maintain both automated and manual test cases. There are various test management tools available in the market that enable teams to execute and maintain test cases in a central repository and generate results. These tools display results on dashboards that can be shared across teams for easier collaboration. As the software testing industry continues to evolve with approaches like DevOps and continuous testing becoming the front and center, there is an increasing need to integrate and implement automation with existing manual testing processes. Automation is no longer an option - it is a necessity that needs to be combined with manual testing to reap the best possible results. Both of these approaches should complement one another. While the role of manual testing is to test applications as an end-user with empathy, find new vulnerabilities, and explore the application, automation can be run simultaneously to help in redundant tasks periodically.
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Ray Parker
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Agile and DevOps is a new way forward. Testing was previously kept as the last stage of the development process where testers were always in a hurry to meet the deadlines and in the process, many bugs made their way into the final product. However, Agile, testers, and developers work together to ensure that every user story satisfies business requirements. Testing is divided into multiple phases such as regression testing, usability testing, performance testing, cross-browser testing, accessibility testing, and many more.
The aim is to deliver quality at speed. It’s what the customers want and companies should base their test management strategy according to this. In this article, we shall discuss why having a test management strategy for your project is a must.
Handling Frequent Changes
In Agile, the project is constantly being updated with new business requirements or enhancements. After delivering certain parts of the application in one sprint, the client may ask the same thing to be done differently or completely from scratch with the same ideas. A situation like this may arise when test cases are not updated based on the new requirements, causing some test cases to fail. With an effective test management strategy, you can ensure that the testing team stays constantly updated with the new requirement changes and is always ready to write effective test cases for testing those requirements.
For Streamlined Tracking
As the project progresses from one stage to another, don’t forget to check each step of testing. It’s important to keep a track record of each phase concerning your production and staging environment. An ideal strategy would ensure that the progress is recorded in the form of a dashboard or a report. This benefits both the current and future projects since it allows the team to detect any test requirement that is incompatible. Such a strategy would help teams document the test cases that can be reused as well.
Tracking Assigned Tasks
Test management strategies also help assign tasks to particular team members according to their skill set. Effective strategies also involve the use of test management software that informs team members and managers about whether the task has been performed or not. Individual efforts combined with effective test management software and strategies help keep track of the entire team’s work.
Scalable Environment
Test management software stores data in a way that it can be accessed by all team members. With an effective strategy, an environment is created which eases the information exchange process among different team members. A test management software allows scalable cloud-based data exchange which can be accessed by team members without any complication.
Real-Time Project Report
An effective strategy also helps maintain documentation based on how a product is tested in real-time. Real-time reporting assists the team and managers in analyzing what is happening on a specific project. Ease of communication between developers and quality analysts enables the project’s flexibility. Real-time reporting speeds up the overall QA process by providing continuous feedback about the product’s behavior.
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Ray Parker
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The last decade has seen significant growth in the software quality assurance parallel to the increasing demands of consumers and the ever-growing challenges of customer retention. The inability of the manual management systems to handle progressively more complex projects with growing teams has made the need for adequate test case management tools more apparent for developing high-quality software applications with limited resources at hand. As the structure of teams becomes more widely distributed across various geographical sites, and the projects grow multifaceted, effective test management becomes a crucial part of the software development cycle.
Need for Test Management Software
With the adoption of agile development and DevOps methodologies, the software development cycles have been compressed significantly which in turn requires rapid action development models where testing processes deliver sound quality checks and take the burden off the developers. Turning a blind eye to the smallest element of the project can have a substantial negative effect on the whole project, and might even delay the delivery of the project in the worst-case scenario. The right test case management tools help and support the development team in recording test scenarios, generating relevant test cases, deriving insights from the test performance, and reporting the insights back to the team.
The primary aspects of the test case management system comprise of;
Easier detection of issues – the fundamental aim of the test case management software is to help the software development team identify and discover any issues in the project during the initial phases with its flexibility and user-friendly interface.
Integration with any testing platform – in order to reduce the time and effort significantly, an enterprise-grade test management software system offers enough flexibility to integrate with multiple testing platforms.
Generating test reports and creating traceability metrics – by providing the development team with a comprehensive report and thorough analytics of the tests, the test management system allows them to track the progress of the tests so that everyone is on the same page. With this tool, the team is also able to understand the status of the testing process by creating reports for the bugs that are detected and fixed along with their feedback, and test execution. The documentation of the previous issues list enables the team to create performance metrics for future reference.
Real-time reports for the team – especially in the case of agile projects, it is important for the team to have reports of real-time tests to ease the tracking process and to ensure a seamless transition from one sprint to another. With the maintenance of the records in the test management tool dashboard, the teams are not only able to effectively manage the current sprint but they are also able to detect if any of the requirements are not compatible with the project scope. Given that this tool assists the quality assurance team to respond promptly to any queries reported by the development team and improve the interactive abilities of the team, the overall flexibility of the quality assurance department is also enhanced.
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Ray Parker
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The proliferating use of automated code review services is one of the most proficient way to reduce low performance and security risks and to boost the quality of the software application. Leveraging architecture analysis tools and code quality mechanisms for the code review automation is recognized as the sure-fire way to enhance the performance of the application, its security, and reliability. As opposed to this, the traditional and manual approach to code reviews lags behind in the fast-paced and digitized world, especially when it comes to providing detailed and actionable insights which are required for business operations today. The fact that automated code review services offer objective and impartial insights which are applicable in future projects as well, trumps the benefits of other manual alternatives.
Key Aspects to Measure Code Quality
There is no one absolute way to measure the quality of the code as the factors that are used to determine good quality varies according to the project and the team.
However
Testability – it determines how well does the software application facilitates the testing process. The extent to which the testers can control, isolate, observe, and automate testing measures the outcome of this characteristic. The number of test cases and scenarios that are required to find defects in the system is directly proportional to how well this trait performs. Among other factors, the size and complexity of the code also have a significant bearing on testability.
Portability – this particular trait relates to the independence of the platforms and checks whether the same software can perform well in different environments. It is imperative for the testers to test code in various platform invariably, instead of waiting until the end of development.
Reliability – the availability of the software, and the number of defects found in the software are tested in the reliability characteristic. It is used to determine that a software application will run smoothly without any glitches over the specified period of the operation. The lower the defect count is, the higher the reliability of the codebase is.
Maintainability – depending on the consistency, size, complexity, and structure of the code base, the maintainability trait ensures that the software can be maintained easily; factors like testability and understandability play an important role in the maintenance of the source code.
Reusability – if the current assets of the system like the code, can be used easily under different environments, then the reusability trait is considered successful. Generally, as a rule of thumb, characteristics like loose coupling and modularity are necessitated in the code for it to be deemed as reusable.
Conclusion
In summary, an automated code review solution has three key advantages over a manual audit; it minimizes the possibility of errors and bias due to the reduction of human involvement, it is ultimately more effective owing to the improved code coverage at a much faster speed, and lastly, it has proven to be more cost-effective for the company. The automated code review software also comprises of specific knowledge to identify weaknesses and vulnerabilities without requiring an expert user.
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