I am a big fan of Fog Creek and their philosophy towards building a business. As luck would have it, I stumbled into starting a company that provides testing services. Inspired by this Spolsky article from 2005,I want Qxf2 to be a place with fantastic working conditions for testers. As a group, we have been taking active steps towards that goal. While we are not there yet, here are few things that we do. We discuss trending topics in the testing world. We think and debate about the important topics in testing. We bounce testing ideas of each other. We share what we know on this blog. We support remote working and flex-timings. An off-shoot of supporting remote-work and flex timings is that we all rarely physically get together in one room as a company. We are now making a conscious effort to meet and learn together. In August, we had our first lunch and learn. We ate lunch while watching an informative and thought provoking video. I regret not taking photographs. I’ll correct that miss from September onward.
August 2014 lunch and learn
I’ll start with the important detail first i.e., lunch. Deepthi Sathish and Rupesh Mishra decided our lunch order. We ordered the elite meal box from Rajdhani. For the learn part of the lunch and learn, we watched a fantastic Cast 2014 talk by Ben Simo:
Youtube video: There was not a breach; there was a blog
Post lunch discussion
Everyone enjoyed the video. Some key highlights from our hour long post-lunch discussion:
Saurabh Chhabra: He used dev tools just the way we do – but ended up finding so much more information. The presenter thought very creatively.
Vrushali Toshniwal: He found a bunch of issues but then took the effort to weave them together.
Deepthi Sathish: I learnt that Email is not secure. I liked the way he presented his defects.
Raji Gali: I liked that he explored the product without explicit requirements or specifications. He pointed out simple things around security that many people do not even think about.
Avinash Shetty: This talk breaks down barriers to starting security testing. Testers sometimes think no security testing can be done unless you are an expert. I am also reminded of a time when I used a recharge website and noticed that it sent the credit card number in the email confirmation.
Rupesh Mishra: Testers think like this man. We are not happy just finding issues. We want to dig more and look for clues. The other day I was on a social network and a particular link failed. I noticed that the URL was missing a file extension. I added it and was able to see page.
Sounded like fun? If you are intrigued by our company culture, feel free to get in touch. We are a small company with no immediate openings – but I like getting in touch with people passionate about testing. Who knows what opportunities arise in the future. Contact us!
I want to find out what conditions produce remarkable software. A few years ago, I chose to work as the first professional tester at a startup. I successfully won credibility for testers and established a world-class team. I have lead the testing for early versions of multiple products. Today, I run Qxf2 Services. Qxf2 provides software testing services for startups. If you are interested in what Qxf2 offers or simply want to talk about testing, you can contact me at: [email protected]. I like testing, math, chess and dogs.
