Job Posting - Sharepoint Admin, Oklahoma City

If you know of someone with Sharepoint experience, please send them Todd's way. You'll find his contact information at the bottom.

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Sr. SharePoint Administrator - Oklahoma City, OK

Primary Duties & Responsibilities:
•Serve as Administrator for SharePoint 2007, SharePoint 2010
•Serve as Administrator for FAST for SharePoint 2010
•Plan and lead application system installations and upgrades.
•Monitor, support and diagnose application systems functioning to ensure specifications are met.
•Modify existing application systems to correct errors, allow it to adapt to new hardware, or to improve its performance.
•Develop procedures for application system testing and validation to ensure system integrity.
•Prepare and review appropriate documentation to record computer specifications, layouts and peripheral equipment modifications.
•Design and perform capacity planning processes to ensure performance is in line with business expectations.
•Analyze user needs and design software requirements within time and cost constraints.
•Develop and support business relationships with project team and business customers.
•Develop and implement policies, procedures and standards to ensure conformance with information systems goals and procedures.
•Report status, issues, and timelines to management staff and project teams.
•Lead multi-function teams in problem resolution, evaluation and implementation of solutions.
•Provide mentoring and training to associate systems administrators and system administrators.

•Strong knowledge of enterprise search concepts
•Strong knowledge of web server technologies/frameworks/concepts (HTTP, networking, Windows Server 2008 R2, Active Directory, PowerShell)
•Demonstrated ability to solve complex technical issues, working alone or in a team
•Demonstrated ability to work in a fast-paced, team environment
•Ability to communicate effectively with all levels of co-workers, clients and other external contacts
•Demonstrated ability to document system architecture, installation configuration, methods and procedures for cross training and troubleshooting
•Excellent written and verbal English communication skills
•Experience with Microsoft FAST Search is preferred
•Experience with Microsoft SharePoint is preferred
Education & Work Experience

Minimum Requirements:
•Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or Management Information Systems or equivalent experience.
•Experience generating or adapting equipment and technology to serve user needs.
Minimum of 4 years Systems Administration - SharePoint experience

Contact:

Todd Laduron
Sr. Technical Recruiter - CDI IT Solutions
602-508-6471

Did you ever...?

Did you ever find a site that you went to start to get slow, buggy or that people just seemed to stop responding to you as if they all agreed to do so at the same time?

It may not be just your imagination or that the site is having issues. You may be flagged as an abusive user and these techniques are intentional ways to convince you to calm down and re-think your approach.

I was reading about the stackoverflow.com site (and related sites) where something needed to be done with the small set of users that were making the site unpleasant for everyone else.

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/06/suspension-ban-or-hellban.html

But what does this have to do with QA? Well, consider what happens if your site behaves erratically, is slow and error prone. Whether it's intentional or not, it drives users away. Do you know how often this happens? What's the impact when it does? How do you bring this to light?

Just something to consider.

Incredibly strong passwords that are easy to remember

Steve Gibson is an interesting fellow that has been around quite a while. One thing he does when not creating commercial products is doing security-related research. He has come up with a way to make strong passwords easy to remember.

https://www.grc.com/haystack.htm

Consider these two passwords:

B0P4LzSzVZ4GgWiSZ5z2

.......D1mw!t.......

According to his calculations, it would take a thousand times more time to crack the second password than the first, even though the first is easier to remember! (check it out for yourself by going to the link above) The idea is that if you take what we typically use for a secure, but memorable password, and padd the front and back with something, anything easy to remember.

For example, take H3!!0 and make it something like one of these:

...H3!!0........

[]H3!!0[][][][]

~~~~H3!!0~

***H3!!0****

<-><->H3!!0<-><->

H3!!0

This increases the length of the password and minimally increases the ability to memorize it.

Job Posting - Norman, OK

If you are in the Norman area and considering opportunities in Quality Assurance, here is one through Tek Systems. They have supported this group for several years and I am very appreciative of that support.

The contact information is at the bottom of the description, please feel free to contact Chris if you are interested.

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The Quality Assurance Analyst is responsible for conducting quality control activities for the IT Services Department. The QA Analyst will analyze application systems, create test case documentation, and execute plans. The successful candidate will have proven experience ensuring that complex software applications are performing as designed. Running queries in SQL. Score well on SQL assessment. Needs to proficient and score 5-6 on a scale to 10. Open up SQL scripts and understand it, do joins, deletes, updates, executes in outer joins, unions. Have SQL Fundamentals.

• Develop and maintain test plans, manual and automated test scripts for user interface, functionality, system and "ad-hoc testing".
• Execute regression tests, functional tests and data tests.
• Document quality assurance practices.
• Provide analysis of test results and deliver solutions to problem areas.
• Ensure that testing activities will allow applications to meet business requirements and systems goals, fulfill end-user requirements, and identify and resolve systems issues.
• Ensure that any new software integration into company systems meets functional requirements, system compliance, and interface specifications.
• Create and execute test scripts, cases, and scenarios that will determine optimal system performance according to specifications.
• Conduct all types of application testing as needed, such as system, unit, regression, load, and acceptance testing methods.
• Analyze formal test results in order to discover and resolve defects, bugs, errors, configuration issues, and interoperability flaws.
• Analyze documentation and technical specifications of any new application under deployment or consideration to determine its intended functionality.
• Produce reports and documentation for all testing efforts, results, activities, data, logging, and tracking.
• Communicate test progress, test results, and other relevant information.

Chris Keller - Technical Recruiter
3501 NW 63RD suite #300, OKLAHOMA CITY, OK 73116
866.585.0552 T 405.254.1723
F 405.415.1460 M 405.819.1310

ckeller@teksystems.com

World IPV6 Day - June 8, 2011

There have been several tests of IPV6 around the world already and this is no different. Major web sites such as Microsoft and Google will offer thier content over IPV6.

Now that all the IPV4 address have been claimed by Regional Internet Registries, it's just a matter of time before they are all used up. There are still questions as to how the IPV6 switchover will occur, but knowing your way around IPV6 will be a new skill to learn.

Book Review - "Open Source Fuzzing Tools" by Gavi Evron

"Open Source Fuzzing Tools" is written by Gavi Evron and does an excellent job providing a broad range of tools used for fuzzing and their basic usage. There is even a chapter that walks you through building your own file fuzzing tool in perl.

Some specific points that I learned from this book:
- There are (at least) three flavors of fuzzing: 1)File fuzzing- where you create malformed files used by the application. 2) Network fuzzing - network traffic used by the application are malformed and sent and 3) Library fuzzing - calling libraries directly with malformed input.
- The more you know about the workings of the application, the better you can tune your fuzzer to generate malformed data.
- The more you know about assmebler, compilers, bytecode, and TCP/IP, the better. These are the building-blocks for fuzzing.

It's possible to run many of these tools, such as wsfuzzer, without a deep understanding of the application and the underlying technologies, but the more you know, the better you are able to understand the output and take appropriate action.

Impressive Presentation Tool

Here is a fun way to do presentations. Let me know what you think of my first one!

Fuzzing on Prezi

Levels of abstraction, from Order to Chaos and back again

"There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened." - Douglas Adams from 'The Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy'

For years, I've thought about the order and chaos of the Universe as a lens to look at work. There is order in the universe in that there is this one large blob. But it quickly devolves into chaos when you see each of the galaxies. But looking at our galaxy, there is a sense of order in the spiral arms that make it up and the line of stars in the night sky that we see. This devolves again into chaos as we see the scattering of star systems within the galaxy. But order shows itself again in the orbits of the planets around the sun and the seemingly-perfect spheres that the planets and moons make. But a closer look reveals the chaos of the surface of the planet with mountains and valleys. We can continue this journey to the infinitesimile, but you should get the idea by now :)

Now think about working in a company. The company has a simple goal of making a profit. Then there is the chaos of how the organization is split up But in business unit, there are often annual goals which are very specific. These are to be met by a variety of teams that must figure out a plan to meet these goals, which you as an individual have specific annual goals. However, on a day-do-day basis, your time is spent doing many things, only some of which is towards the annual goals directly.

If you are still reading, congratulations! (and thanks for bearing with me while I try to get to the point) So, where do you like spending your time, in the chaos or the order? Where do your peers like spending time? In which location does your company's culture want you to spend your time?

Just something to ponder...

Book Review - "Threat Modeling" by Frank Swiderski and Window Snyder

Even though this book is from 2004, the method it describes for approaching security testing is sound. The basic method is:

• Create a Threat Profile




• Idendity Targets


• Identify Entry/Exit Points


• Build Models based on this data


• Associate Risks with each Target


• Determine how these risks will be tested


• Perform tests and report results


• Repeat

This book is an easy read and there is little technical knowledge that is required to be able to understand the concepts presented, which allows it to be technology-agnostic. However, you will need a bit more technical skill to be able to perform some of the analysis and testing that is described. The examples are helpful and provide a good guide on how do document the models.

I would recommend this book to anyone that is responsible for building, testing or responsible for the security of an application.

FTP is 40 years old this week

The idea of transferring files between computers has been around since networking began, but this protocol is the one that has survived the longest.

Happy Birthday FTP!

Have Fun Learing!

Did you ever want to spend team time to learn a new skill or hone an existing one? Here is a site that lists lots of games to play that are centered on software development teams. http://tastycupcakes.org/ Enjoy!

Just missed TEDxOKC - Doh!

Someone just told me that a TED conference was going to be held in OKC and when I looked it up, I found I just missed it! Ack.

You can go to their website and sign up for their newsletter, twitter feed and facebook page to keep in touch.

Stop wasting time debugging - advice from a sage

"If you want more effective programmers, you will discover that they should not waste their time debugging - they should not introduce the bugs to start with" - Edsger Dijkstra 1972 "The Humble Programmer"

When Edsger Dijkstra said this, he was speaking about a vision of the future where programming practices would drastically change. In this article, he wrote about 'The Software Crisis' and the resulting revolution. He predicted that anyone wishing to deliver reliable software would find a way to do so more quickly, which led to the quote above.

How much have we progressed?

Adrenaline Junkies and Template Zombies: Understanding Patterns of Project Behavior - a review

I've been reading "Adrenaline Junkies and Template Zombies" by the whole Atlantic Systems Guild crew, Tom DeMarco, Peter Hruschka, Tim Lister, Steve McMenamin, James Robertson, and Suzanne Robertson. You'll recognize Tom DeMarco and Tim Lister as the authors of Peopleware.

This is an easy and enjoyable read where you can see different patterns (and anti-patterns) for people, teams and organizations. Anyone at any level of the organization that is interested in trying to understand how people and teams work would enjoy this book.

Among the great quotes they cite in the book is this one.

“The correct amount of anarchy on a project is not zero.” —Mike Mushet

You'll laugh when you see some of the bad behaviors "others" engage in and cry when you see yourself. The book is a few years old, but it is something I expect will stay on my bookshelf for a very long time.

The roots of Design Patterns go as back as far as the 1960s

If you are not familiar with design patterns, look here.

In 1964, Christopher Alexander wrote a book called 'Notes on the Synthesis of Form' for architects and civil engineers to help them cope with incomplete and contradictory requirements during their design process. He suggests they simplify the process by looking at just the abstract elements and build a model that meets the basic requirements. This is followed by his contribution to the 1977 book 'A Pattern Language' where these abstract elements are standardized into a pattern that is applied to the overall design. This second book strongly influenced a paper on some patterns for smaltalk in 1987 which influenced the seminal work, 'Design Patterns: Elements of Object-Oriented Software' in 1994.

Hands-on training for Software Security!

OWASP has a project called WebGoat that allows you to learn about software security by testing and fixing an intentionally insecure web site. http://www.owasp.org/index.php/Category:OWASP_WebGoat_Project Leave a comment if you've worked through this and let everyone know your experiences!

The Stack is 54 years old! (at least the German Patent for it is)

The following link is a copy of the Patent application for the use of a stack to perform mathematical operations. We take this idea for granted today as a method for processing data, but the idea can be traced back at least this far. http://www.fh-jena.de/~kleine/history/software/BauerSamelson-patent-de1094019.pdf

QA Comics

I posted a comic series a few years ago,

http://www.webcomicsnation.com/not-bob/sqa/series.php?view=single&ID=70234

While the following strip isn't the first, clicking on the link will take you to the beginning :), Enjoy!

"If it weren't so sad, it would be enough to make you laugh. But instead it makes you cry"

While the quote sounds like it came from Yogi Berra, it summarizes how you may feel when it takes more than $7 million dollars to cancel a project.

http://randallrice.blogspot.com/2011/03/minnesota-taxpayers-to-foot-725-million.html

Mr. Fails

Here is a link to a story about testing software in the form of a children's book

http://blog.softwaretestingclub.com/2010/12/mr-fails/

It's good, check it out!