It's necessary that the CSSLP candidate become familiar with the different kinds of testing artifacts, that is, methods and items that are going to be tested. The candidate needs to understand the importance of security testing and how it impacts the quality of software. It is a well established fact, that proper testing can improve both the security and the quality, in general terms, of the software being tested.

The candidate needs to have a good understanding of the different types of functional and security testing and the benefits and weaknesses of each. The candidate needs to be familiar with how common software security vulnerabilities, bugs and flaws can be tested, understand how to track defects and address test findings and of course, to know about test data management and how test data should be managed for software assurance.

We're going to cover the topics of standards for software quality assurance, testing methodology security testing, environment, and testing considerations. Now, section one covers important and foundational concepts on the process and execution of testing. Also covered, are these in terms of type descriptions for tests, topics regarding quality and product integrity and various other considerations.

So no matter how expert the designers and the builders may be, even those tuned to building security in, so to say, that of itself it does not necessarily mean that the software is in fact secure. It is imperative to validate and verify the functionality and security of software. In other words, take nothing for granted. Security testing is an integral process in the secure software development cycle. The results of security testing, of course, have a direct bearing on the quality of software as well.

Even though this may seem somewhat more subtle than the actual impact that it has on the security of the final product. Now, software that has passed such validation is said to be of relatively higher quality than software that hasn't been put through it. And what we're going to discuss will be a way to discern how that is actually made to happen. Now, for software to be secure and resilient against hackers it must take into account certain foundational concepts of information security, of course. These will include confidentiality, integrity and availability, as always, but also include authentication, authorization, accountability, the management of sessions, exceptions and errors and figuration parameters. However, conceiving, configuring, building and integrating them with the overall architecture of the software, goes for nothing, if their functionality and performance are not also tested to verify that they do the job as planned or, as is often the case, as built. The point being here that however good your initial plan and design was, what really matters is what actually ended up being done. With such variation, testing becomes all the more important. It's like the old saying, that if it looks like a duck and walks like a duck, well, no doubt you know the rest of that. And that is certainly the case here. Nevertheless, in the case of our duck, no matter how much it may look and walk like a duck, we must be sure as we can be that it can still quack properly.