The Thesis and It's Goals

The scope of this thesis is to secure the company's website. Securing in this context has nothing (or very little) to do with security. In this sense it means making sure that the product satisfies it's specifications, i.e. keeps the promises me & the rest of the SoundCloud crew gives :) .

So lets take a look at how the current state is in the company. One of the main goals to achieve a stable product is to integrate testing in the development process. Following the agile methodology, the company uses so called test-driven-development (tdd), which I think is a great way to make the product more stable. (For more on test-driven-development, read my blog post about that here). The current state is that the company has quite a good test suite on the backend side but absolutely none on the frontend side. It also lacks some sort of backend integration tests. By this I mean that there exists tests that test certain modules and their functionality but there lacks tests that test the integration of these modules, i.e. that they function togheter.

My hopothesis for this thesis project is therefore that the company needs to adopt three additional testing strategies. First : the backendside needs integration tests for almost all of it's modules. Second : the frontend side, i.e. the javascripts, needs some kind of unit testing suits to verify that the javascript works on a function/method level. Third : the product needs some kind of acceptence test framework in place, i.e. a tool that verifies that the final product is working as it should.

The main goal of the thesis it to find a way to integrate these testing strategies in the development process along-side with the current testing framework. One issue that arises is that the findings must be easy to adopt and that the tests and their frameworks must be easy to maintain. By easy I mean that the tests must give more stability and reability to the procuct than they produce overhead by the need to correct tests and keep them up to date. The ideal solution would be to find ways to integrate the new needed tests in the companies current testsuits and workflow.