Evil Tester

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 […]

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 […]

“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!

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 […]

When I test applications that read files I like to test how they handle locked files.
And yes, I once had a situation where I needed to lock lots of files, and then lock some more and then lock even more. So I wrote Locky to help me. [Download]

Looking back at ETA I can see that my current approach to documenting exploratory testing has changed since I last worked on ETA.
Back then I remember my style as:

what did I just do?
what did I just observe?
scribbled thoughts on paper

I kind of scribbled future thoughts on bits of paper off to the side as […]

A long time ago I started writing a tool to help me with my exploratory testing [Download].
I wanted a tool that would sit out of the way unnoticed until I needed it (at the call of a hot key), then I could type in a little note, save it and forget about it. And in […]

The Microsoft compatibility Virtual PC images have had a re-release.  These time out on April 2009 (even when they time out you still get a grace 1 hour usage as I found out this morning).

Sometime back, Linda Wilkinson had a good post on Test Contractor behaviour I shall add a few more ‘things not to do’ to the list based on some recent (and slightly less recent) experiences with contract testing staff.