Monkey

Evil weasels and random monkeys

• steve
• Best practices

I’m doing testing on a new release of Abacus at the moment, so I’m in a software QA (Quality Assurance) frame of mind.
One of the tenets of software QA is “Assume users are malicious”. That’s also one of the tenets of security engineering, but in a completely different way.
A security engineer treats users as malicious, as the users he or she is most concerned about are crackers trying to compromise their system, so they really are malicious. A QA engineer knows that if you have enough users in the field, making enough different mistakes or trying to do enough unusual things, they’ll find all the buggy little corners of your application eventually – and crash it or corrupt data more reliably than a genuinely malicious user.
As a QA engineer it’s easier to personify the forces of chaos you’re defending against as a single evil weasel than a million random monkeys.
In the bulk email world the main points where you interact with your users are signup, confirmation, unsubscription and click-throughs. Always think about what the evil weasel will do at that point.
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