system testing

Fuzz Testing with afl-fuzz (American Fuzzy Lop)

Last year’s wave of major network security vulnerabilities has kept adversarial testing on my mind. Security auditing tools can discover bugs which are missed during more general testing. In particular, my interest was piqued by American fuzzy lop, a fuzzer released by the Google security team, and I’ve been waiting for the right project to try […]

6 Reasons to Build a Firmware Test Suite

At Atomic, we build a lot of systems that incorporate device firmware talking to software. We also commonly interface with other firmware or software teams. I believe every project that involves firmware talking to software should include a high-level suite of tests that are written against the firmware’s interface to the software (e.g. Bluetooth, Ethernet, […]

Testing & Tooling in EmberJS

Like many other Atoms, I’ve recently been doing some work with EmberJS. Ember is an awesome web development toolkit with some really killer features. One of my favorite parts of Ember is how easy it is to test. The framework comes bundled with a system testing framework, and its object model makes unit testing a […]

Convenient Trick for Tolerance-based Test Assertions Using #ish

Sometimes it’s hard to just say what you mean. When writing automated system and integration tests, I occasionally find it tricky to express the precise expected value of test output. For example, I expect the timestamp on a database record to be within a second or two of “now,” but I can’t predict the exact […]

Building the Right Acceptance Tests

Automated acceptance tests are valuable, but they’re also easy to build badly. So to make sure you don’t end up with a frustrating pile of automated headaches, first strive to understand why you’re writing the tests. Specific goals often dictate a different set of tools or approach to your instrumentation around the tests. Done correctly, […]