The document summarizes notes from a testing workshop on the Redmine project management application. Participants tested various aspects of Redmine and identified 15 bugs, including issues with PDF exports not containing all data, character encoding problems in CSVs, ability to delete the only admin account, and other data validation and synchronization bugs. Workshop leaders provided hints and interrupts to prompt deeper investigation and testing of areas like HTTP traffic, DOM manipulation, and breaking file exports.

1. Black Ops Testing
Workshop
Agile Testing Days
Tony Bruce
Steve Green
Alan Richardson

2. January 2015 Workshop, London
www.BlackOpsTesting.com

3. Introduction
● 3 * 5 minute lightning talks
● We expect you to test stuff
● We will coach & ask questions as you test
● We may periodically debrief

4. What you are about to test
● Redmine
○ www.redmine.org
● Project Planning App
○ GUI, Rest API, Feeds, DB, Web Server

5. Alan’s Bit at the start
● Model, Observe, Interrogate, Reflect,
Manipulate
● Tools help me observe and manipulate
● Note Taking

6. A model of how Alan tests
● Model
○ What I think I understand. Different viewpoints.
● Observe
○ at different points to corroborate/invalidate model
● Reflect
○ find gaps, lack of depth, derive intent
● Interrogate
○ Focussed, deep dive observation with intent
● Manipulate
○ Hypothesis exploration and “how we do stuff”

7. Tools help me...
… Observe and Manipulate

8. Browser

9. Risks

10. Tools

11. ...extend the model

12. Note Taking
● Why:
○ Questions, Ideas, Risks, etc.
● What:
○ ToDos, Issues, Observations,
Notes, etc.
● When:
○ Timestamps, sequential order
● Where:
○ urls, environment, users, etc.
● How:
○ commands, methods,
tools used, etc.
Evidence:
● logs, screenshots, output, files,
etc.

13. Tony’s bit
● Test ideas
● Tools
● Information & Intelligence

14. Explore for test ideas
Prep
- Notes
- Summary
- Important bits
- Ideas
- Comments
- Questions
- Thoughts
- Six Honest Men
"I Keep Six Honest
Serving Men ..."
I KEEP six honest serving-men
(They taught me all I knew);
Their names are What and Why and
When And How and Where and
Who.
…….. Rudyard Kipling

15. Tools
Browser
- Add-ons
- Extensions
- Developer tools
-
Others
- Accessibility
- Security
- Debugging
-

16. Bob Stewart
Leadership Under Pressure: Tactics from the Front Line

17. Information

18. Steve’s bit
What are we going to test?
● What’s new?
● What’s changed?
● What’s important?
● What are known buggy areas?
● What has not been tested previously?

19. What are we going to test?

20. What might be difficult?

21. What might be difficult?
● How can we create enough data?
● How can we test time-related features?
● How do we know if the right thing
happened?

22. Lightning Talk Debrief
Extras?
Questions?
Comments?

23. Collaboration Rules
● Don’t load test the app, we are all using it
○ If you accidentally bring it down through a clever then that’s fine,
● Don’t change data you didn’t create

24. Where is the app?
● You can install it locally if you want
○ http://redmine.org
● You can get an install or VM from bitnami
○ https://bitnami.com/stack/redmine
● You can use the redmine demo
○ http://demo.redmine.org/
● You can use our server
○ ….

25. Where is the app?
● Links removed as
only valid at the
time we conducted
the workshop

26. Testing Phase 1
● Consider what we said
● Test the app in new ways, take notes, try
new tools
● Black Ops Team will mingle - do ask for help
● We will debrief prior to the break

27. “...no plan of operations extends
with any certainty beyond the first
contact with the main hostile force.”
Field Marshall Helmuth Carl Bernard Graf von Moltke, 1871

28. Test the **** out of Redmine

29. Hints...
Are you monitoring the HTTP traffic?
Have you changed the DOM?
Cookies?
Internationalisation?
Logged issues?
...

30. Debrief
Observations
Questions

31. Break (30 mins)
Feel free to carry on testing if you want

32. Testing Phase 2
● You tell us

33. Interrupt 1
Structure your data to make testing easier.
● Unique values (where possible)
● Sequenced

34. Interrupt 2
Testing maxlength and truncation.

35. Interrupt 2
Testing maxlength and truncation.
0005x0010x0015x0020x0025x0030x0035x004
0x0045x0050x0055x0060x0065x0070x0075x0
080x0085x0090x0095x0100x0105x0110x0115
x0120x0125x0130x0135x0140x0145x0150x01
55x0160x0165x0170x0175x0180x0185x0190x
0195x0200x0205x0210x0215x0220x0225x023

36. Interrupt 2
Testing maxlength and truncation.
http://bit.ly/1B7gQlx

37. Interrupt 2a
● We have a broken app - can you get in?
● Links removed as only valid at the time of
the workshop

38. Interrupt 3
Recording data flow.

39. Interrupt 4
Can we break the CSV, Atom or PDF exports?
What might do that?

40. Debrief Phase

41. Bugs we found 1
● The PDF does not contain the Start Date,
Estimated Time, % Done or File Description
for the attachments that are included in the
New Issue form.
● The PDF does not contain the Target
Version and Spent Time values that are
included in the View Issue form.

42. Bugs we found 2
The Atom feed from the View Issue page has
no content when it is viewed immediately after
creating an issue. It did have content after
adding a quote to the issue.

43. Bugs we found 2

44. Bugs we found 3
The File Description for an image is not saved if
too many characters are entered in the New
Issue form. We did not investigate where the
boundary is.

45. Bugs we found 4
The PDF that is generated from the Gantt page
always shows the default zoom level regardless
of the zoom level that has been selected.
The URL of the PDF link contains a ‘zoom’
parameter (which does nothing). Changing the
‘months’ parameter has the desired effect.

46. Bugs we found 5
Some non-Roman characters are displayed
correctly on all HTML pages but they are not
displayed in PDFs.

47. Bugs we found 6
Some non-Roman characters are not displayed
correctly in CSVs.

48. Bugs we found 7
You’re able to delete all user accounts,
including admin.
There is only 1 admin (as far as I could see)
Tell us how….

49. Bugs we found 7 cont.
Record browser traffic while deleting a account.
Find the delete POST

50. Bugs we found 8
"Your account has been activated. You can
now log in. "
System says I am already "logged in as eris"
and I am on my account page
Minor issue about wording

51. Bugs we found 9
Error message about emails already in use
when registering - privacy concern
“Email has already been taken”

52. Bugs we found 10
Maximum length of email is 60 chars but needs
to accept 254

53. Bugs we found 11
Can use an invalid language when registering a
user.

54. Bugs we found 12
Truncation on project identifier with no error or
warning message
i.e. create project with 255 char identifier -
truncated to 100

55. Bugs we found 13
When creating a project, the ID and name are
populated via javascript but if I change the
name then the identifier is not kept in sync.

56. Bugs we found 14
Can create an invalid enabled_modules entry
by submitting a module name which does not
exist when creating a project

57. Bugs we found 15
Change url to have csv or pdf views
System should respond differently to csv and
pdf on projects when GUI request rather than
an API request 406 is better for API, 404 with
html or 406 with html payload might be better

58. Rathole 1 - Password
Alan thought there was a bug with password
lengths, and storing in a varchar 40, since
password can be very long.
But, a ‘hash’ is stored, not the password, this
took time to discover.