We know you have been developing web applications for years and you're pretty good at. But on some occasions you get a support ticket that boggles your mind and you wonder after you solved the issue how it was possible you missed that glitch. Are there ways to ensure that these kind of situations are being prevented before code ends up in production?

Yes there are! It's called testing, profiling and analysing. Most developers are already familiar with unit testing and some degree of automated acceptance and performance testing. There are many more forms of testing that can be applied on a software project that will turn your web application inside and out, put it on a virtual grill to see where it breaks, how it breaks and how it recovers from these failures.

I want to challenge you in this workshop to discover new ways of testing a web application where you will be analysing static reports on the codebase, compare performance and profiling statistics and execute automated tests that will detect security, privacy and functional errors. You will work in groups of people with different backgrounds and experiences solving challenging quests until one group has completed their score card or time has run out. We will review all quests and their answers so you can learn about the things you know, the things you know you don't know and even touch the things you don't know you don't know. A blast for everyone and a wonderful exposure to why quality is essential for any project to ensure your web application stays robust under the most harsh exposures of the internet.

Comments

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Dries Vints at 14:42 on 22 Feb 2018

This was a really fun evening. Glad to see so much people joining! I understand this was a trial run so it's normal that things went wrong. Hope this feedback helps:

- Try to have the groups on the classroom created beforehand so people only need to join the relevant group
- Perhaps allow everyone to do all the different tests. Some groups finished pretty fast. It's ok if they don't get to finish everything but at least this way they all get to do all the different types of tests and not just one type
- Improve infrastructure so the Nucleus guys can't DDoS it ?
- Add prizes so everyone in the group has one instead of just one person (or just skip prizes all together, not that important for me personally)
- Add a Slack channel on PHP Belgium where everyone can join and where you can copy/paste useful links, commands, etc
- Allow people to install and trial run the docker instance beforehand (without giving any information about the tests). This will save some time to get people started

All in all I think the most important thing is to allow people to do more. If you can find ways to get people started faster you'll have more time for them to do more types of tests. I think if you work on these points it can really become a great and fun workshop.

I had a great time even with the "bugs" ?Thanks for a great evening!