Evil Tester

I mentioned that Fiddler forms an essential part of my web testing toolkit, and recently I had a hankering for knowledge of Security Testing. Somehow I found my way to a Fiddler plugin called Watcher from Casaba Security. This lets me slowly learn about security testing in the course of my normal testing.

Simple to use: enable Watcher using the new [Security Auditor] tab that appears after installing watcher, and test normally, then check the Security tab and see the warnings Watcher has flagged.

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I've done a fair bit of Web and Flash testing recently and I suddenly realised how much I rely on various tools I have installed to help me. In fact, I don't know how I ever managed to test web sites without these. So in this post I'll provide a wee introduction to the tools I've used in the past few months. If you don't use the following tools then I'd love to know which tools you use to get visibility into, and control of, your testing.

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I still remember my first real test.

Do you?

Since I generalise wildly, I assume that you do.

Note: my first 'real' test. Not "the first time I found a bug". For the purposes of this exercise I defined my first 'real' test as the first time I can remember purposefully thinking like a tester with regards to software and actively hunting out a bug.

You may choose a different definition - up to you. And you may have more effective recall of your formative years - bully for you. But - my blog, my story.

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Since Compendium Developments houses my book reviews, you may have missed:

• How We Test Software At Microsoft
• Apache JMeter
• Software Testing An ISEB Foundation
• Next Generation Java Testing
• Head Rush Ajax

Which ones do you read?

• CrossTalk
• Testing Experience
• Better Software
• Software Testing and Performance
• (IN)SECURE magazine
• Methods and tools

Any more I should add to this list?

I recently facilitated a session on free and open source test tools at the Test Management Summit. This post contains an edited form of my notes prior to the event and some amendments and additions based on the discussion from the session. [Download the slides from the session]

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I dislike the term QA when applied to testers in general. I dislike it more when applied to my team. I dislike it even more when applied to me. If you read this, and you use the term QA - stop it. 

Bad Trend towards QA

Unfortunately if I graphed the trend for verbal usage of this term I would see draw a line heading upwards.

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A few testers have recently mentioned the tool FireShot to me. Note they only 'mentioned' it to me - they should have raved about it and shouted out its name, and in between the effusive praising performed a little happy dance. This plugin works in both IE and Firefox and allows you to capture the whole browser page as an image and send it to the clipboard.

When you upgrade to the 'pro' version you get editing capabilities, but the free version will speed up your web testing defect reporting no end.

Related links:

• http://screenshot-program.com/fireshot/

"I clicked on that, why didn't the click work!"

I recently faced the challenge of using Selenium to automate a web application that stubbornly resisted my attempts to automate it - until I found the fireEvent!

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Over the years I have used and reused a variant of a single AutoIt script. The script basically polls windows for a dialog that matches a certain pattern and then performs some action.

I most recently used this to get rid of the IE dialog that pops up using Selenium with IEHTA asking if you want the web page to close the window.

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