SCDUG August 2020 – “Good Enough” Testing Plans

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This month I gave a talk at SCDUG on encouraging creating testing plans for teams that have been resistant for any number of reasons. This talk is meant to help people argue for the value of testing, and help you create a testing plan that will save more resources that it costs. This was an initial draft of that talk that I’ll be giving a revised and improved version of at Drupal Camp Atlanta in September.

If you would like to join us please check out our up coming events on Meetup for meeting times, locations, and remote connection information.

We frequently use these presentations to practice new presentations, try out heavily revised versions, and test out new ideas with a friendly audience. So if some of the content of these videos seems a bit rough please understand we are all learning all the time and we are open to constructive feedback. If you want to see a polished version checkout our group members’ talks at camps and cons.

If you are interested in giving a practice talk, leave me a comment here, contact me through Drupal.org, or find me on Drupal Slack. We’re excited to hear new voices and ideas. We want to support the community, and that means you.

Simple Electron Starter

Earlier today I push my Electron Simple Starter to Github. It has dependencies only to Electron, Electron Debug, and ESlint (but no specific settings, you can add those yourself). All the basic pieces are in place to encourage good security practices. It will run without warnings or errors, and puts in place all plumbing you need for their current inter-process communication, default overrides, and process sandboxing to help you write a secure app.

Off and on I’ve been playing at writing simple programs in JavaScript using Electron. As a long-time web developer the idea of writing a web app that can be compiled to an native application across a web swath of major operating systems has massive appeal.

But when I started to write Electron apps to scratch various itches, I was quickly annoyed at the number of security warnings I got when following the project tutorials. The PHP community used to ignore bad security in tutorials to the detriment of web, so it bugs me to see that behavior crop up in other places. With my most recent side project – a Salesforce API exploration tool – I finally decided I was overdue in figuring out how to resolve all the warnings the basic quick start from the main project triggers. Using a combination of this secure electron project template and the main project’s security tutorial I finally got there.

Then I wanted to scratch a different itch, which hasn’t really gone anywhere, cause all the work to get started in a secure way felt like a mountain to climb again. The secure electron template is too opinionated for me to use directly for a small toy project, and ElectronForce has all kinds of other code already in place, so I spun my wheels for awhile. Then I finally bit the bullet and extracted the bits I needed for the next project. Once I realized I had a fairly clean baseline, I figured I would probably want it again soon (I create projects frequently to explore an idea or scratch an itch) so I created a new project template that sets the baseline and is fairly unopinionated. My goal is to have something I can grab to start writing a simple application quickly.

While I’ve made some effort to secure this project baseline, security is always the project developer’s responsibility – you are still responsible for your project’s security. Please feel free to use my template, but understand that you still have to follow best practices to keep your app secure and those will change over time. The Electron project will inevitably evolve and change their security system again, and I will not promise to keep up. Also this is a template, not a library, when some future Electron adds features I didn’t use, you’ll need to update your project.

If some specific piece of this template confuses you, please feel free to ask either here or on Github. I can try to explain as best I am able, and maybe you’ll inspire another post sometime in the future to cover it in depth.