Lightning strikes twice: Andrew Trenk and Jim McMaster of the Google Testing on the Toilet team have again generously allowed me to author another episode, this time on the Heartbleed bug, derived from my TotT-inspired While My Heart Gently Bleeds treatment. In addition to Andrew’s thoughtful, thorough feedback, John Penix contributed a chunk of particularly helpful comments, and Martin Pool suggested making clear that the original TLS handshake commit introducing Heartbleed contained no tests; I’ve backported these suggestions into my original work. The title of the official episode is Episode 330, “While My Heart Gently Bleeds”.
I’m also tickled I got to work in a Beatles reference, in this case to While My Guitar Gently Weeps. Long-time TotT fans will find such references sprinkled throughout my past episodes; Pyfakefs contains Beatles lyrics in its header docstring. Andrew suggested I provide a more explicitly relevant title, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I am compelled to seize every opportunity to enlighten anyone who’s lived a life devoid of Beatles influence so far—even moreso than I am to seize opportunities to use severe, user-visible software defects to make a powerful case in support of unit testing culture.
Watch out, Antoine Picard: I’m catching up to your TotT authorship record!
In other news: my “goto fail”-specific article Finding More Than One
Worm in the Apple is poised to appear in ACM
Queue any day now; my proof-of-concept test for
Heartbleed, reworked as heartbeat_test.c, is on the verge of being integrated
into OpenSSL via OpenSSL Pull Request
#81; and work is more than well
underway on my upcoming “Goto Fail, Heartbleed, and Unit Testing Culture”
article, as mentioned on the Google+ thread for my Open Letter to Dan
Geer post. Things are moving right along!