The particular vulnerability of security and information integrity is a big risk that is faced by many companies developing various digital products. Even one little public incident can bring down the company or hurt its commercial goodwill (and team spirit as well).

Hence, security testing is a very important and essential process. Sadly, not many specialists are professionals in this field.

That’s because we’re talking about a quite difficult and confusing information world. And if one wants to become a professional security tester, he/she needs to study a lot of methodological literature and improve his/her technical knowledge.

Unfortunately, not everyone has enough time and propensity to exploring the basics of such a kind of testing. But it doesn’t mean that there is no chance to improve one’s skills.

[highlight dark=”no”]High-qualitative testing always gives a safe and multifunctional product.[/highlight] Specialists who don’t have at least minimum special data cannot find a lot of security threats such as packet sniffing, cross-site scripting, various SQL injections, etc. Certainly, this is only some part of the security testing process.

Further, we will analyze other factors that influence the professional skills of security tester.

Software development-security-tests relationship

Qualitatively Optimized Program Code

If a tester clearly understands a code, it’s quite easy for him/her to sort out all the hidden vulnerabilities during the code review. Clear program code improves the functioning of any security tool – it is easier for a program to search problems and hidden defects.

Certainly, the testing process can make program code clearer and more readable. Even if a tester isn’t professional in the programming basics, he/she can still help to improve the correct code creation.

Pay attention to the code review. Even if you don’t know how to write the necessary program code, you must pay attention to all the actions inside it. If all variables, methods, and classes have correct names, and code structure is organized effectively, a tester should have at least a minimum idea of what is going on with the code.

It isn’t necessary to have basic development skills if you want to help a team to create optimized code. Sometimes, all the tester needs to do is to wonder what a programmer does wrong or what the structure of internal architecture is. These may be trivial questions but their answers help to find an incorrect code. Even if it doesn’t work, you can still get to know much interesting about a system. And actually, that’s pretty good.

Ongoing Performance of Exploratory Testing

Some security vulnerabilities don’t require professional skills from a tester.

It is a specific exploratory creative exercise for the mind to search for ways how to make private information accessible. QA specialists who work in software testing companies should possess exactly such a skill. It helps to avoid potential problems connected with web security.

Qualitative exploratory testing allows finding a lot of problems in system security. If you know that the program code will be analyzed with this method, you can significantly help the whole team. Namely, everyone can start considering the potential usage of the developed product from the side of virtual and imperfect people who, to some degree, are interested in a product.

Bug Tracking During the Whole Software Life Cycle

Undoubtedly, you can improve the focus on software quality in different ways. But despite the measures taken, you should always test the product for some security vulnerabilities. They will interfere with the program performance or will be absent at all.

Here we are talking about so-called monitoring. You should think of how the bugs will be detected and how to solve the potential security problems. It is a tester’s task to think over the things that can be tested and what exactly can go wrong. Also, this is another way that allows testing to improve the security at all the available levels.

To sum up, we’d like to say that testing the quality and security of the software helps to create a useful and multifunctional product that will be popular on the market.