I read an article this week about which programming language hackers use (http://www.softwaretestingclub.com/profiles/blogs/which-programming-language-do-hackers-use) and while at first, I didn’t see the relationship between hacking and software testing, I came to realize that they have a good amount of similarities. Thinking more in depth about it, the act of hacking is just finding vulnerabilities in a software or program which is the same objective as QA testers (although the intents may be different).
Something interesting about the article was that when asked, “what programming language do hackers use”, the answer given by an expert hacker Adrian Lamo was totally not what I was expecting. He responded that he does not use a programming language which caught me off-guard because I didn’t think it was even possible to hack / test without the use of a programming language. The most memorable and significant piece of information I got out of this article was when Adrian Lamo further explains his answer by saying that its more important to learn how to read code rather than learning how to code. By learning how to efficiently read code, you can dissect how programmers think, what their tendencies are, and what common mistakes they make which can give you a better idea of what to test.
From the blog CS@Worcester – Tan Trieu's Blog by tanminhtrieu and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.