Archive
Partnering with ForgeRock to deliver Open Identity and Access Management Solutions
profiq just announeced strategic partnership with ForgeRock for system integration of open-source and standard-based Access and Identity Management (IAM) products. This is a fundamental milestone in fulfilling profiq’s system integration and system testing strategy. We have spent the last 8+ years with deploying and testing ForgeRock products and their predecessors and looking forward to offering an extended service to customers in the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary with ForgeRock.
OpenAM Session Upgrade: Overview
SSO authentication introduces some technical challenges besides providing obvious benefits. Imagine for example that you need to assign different types or levels of authentication to different resources or different actions within a domain. E.g. you allow users to view information, if they successfully authenticate using user name and password, while you may require them to insert a special security code besides user name and password, if they want to start editing. Or you allow users to access general content using user name and password, while accessing specific content (e.g. admin content) needs a security certificate.
Now, what if the user is logged-in with one level or type of authentication, while she attempts to access a resource that requires a different level or type of authentication? Will she be asked to log-in again? What happens to the SSO session technically in such cases?
Knowing your subject
This article follows-up with the series of articles about tackling test complexity, adding a view on the importance of product knowledge, when coping with the complexity of testing. Let’s assume that you understand already, who your customers are;)
I managed testing of a large integrated suite of software products on one of my past projects. Each product had its years of individual history already, when the decision was made to release them as a suite. And each of them was quite complex on its own, even without considering integration with other products. The number of installation issues reported by customers started increasing to an unacceptable level after a couple of years of the products suite’s existence. The whole engineering organization became concerned about the issue. First hypotheses about the cause assumed that the released installer was defective or that the product documentation was unclear. These were not proven however. So, we decided to conduct a profound root-cause analysis.
Missing the forest for the trees
Understanding customer needs for being able to do good testing sounds like commonplace that doesn’t need a special discussion. And testing projects often omit to discuss them indeed. Testing teams often start their project involvement with reading functional (or non-functional) specifications, skipping the customer view. I’m still mentioning it on the first place in the introduction of approaches to tackle testing complexity.
Tackling complexity
Software complexity is one of the most significant challenges that
a software tester may face. Testing software that is complex usually requires a breadth of knowledge and experience. The goal that the tester needs to accomplish with regards to complexity is: to test the software in a reasonable time and at a reasonable cost.
As an example, think about ways to test upgrades of a database system with the following support matrix that gives altogether billions of combinations to test. Can this test scope be reasonably covered? Maybe. Let’s see several techniques that can help addressing complexity.
Welcome techies!
Be welcome on profiq’s blog! Here comes a personal intro, in top of the general overview of the blog on the About page.
profiq is an independent software testing company that was established in 2010 and is owned by former Sun system engineers and system testers. We enjoy working in system engineering and system testing, that’s why we ended up establishing a testing company after leaving Sun. And that’s why we start to write this blog too – going a step beyond our regular business needs. So, who you will hear from:
|
Nemanja Lukic – Madrid
|
Rasta Kanocz – Prague
|
|
Slavomir Katuscak – Prague
|
Gabor Puhalla – Prague
|
|
Ladislav Folta – Ostrava
|
|
We hope, you will find our articles useful and as much as possible you will enjoy reading them! Especially, if: You are passionate about technology besides it being your job. You enjoy investigating how things work, besides understanding what they do. You don’t expect software to be perfect and you actually like exploring its qualities. You are motivated by learning and open to share. And last, but not least, technology or testing are not your only interest;)
We are looking forward to your feedback!
