A software test is no better than the data that drives it. Fuzz testing is a great way to find buggy, exploitable, or otherwise bad code – and if you’re working with a native application that operates on file input, it’s a solved problem. Grab AFL or some other all-in-one suite, hit go, and profit! But what about web services? What about managed applications? For a service-based developer, fuzz testing your HTTP serving layer isn’t all that interesting if you’re running on the latest version of Apache. Fuzz testing your application along its interface boundaries, though? Very interesting...
Melissa Benua
In her career at companies from large to small, Melissa Benua has worked in nearly every software development role—engineer, test, DevOps, and program management. She's created and run high-availability, high-quality services at Boeing and Microsoft on products such as Bing, Cortana, and Xbox One. Melissa discovered her love of massively-scaled systems while working on the Bing backend, where she honed the art of keeping highly-available complex systems up while undergoing massive code churn. Now a senior engineer and manager at the disruptive gaming startup PlayFab, Melissa isn’t afraid to mix traditional approaches with bold new ideas to make her products better, faster, and more reliable. She’s passionate not only about maximizing efficiency both in her product code and in her developer tools but also about sharing best practices among colleagues and the tech world at large!