Evil Tester

James Whittaker has talked and blogged about Testing HUDs. In this post I will show you how to build a simple HUD for testing web applications. And In true Blue Peter stylee you can find all the things you need, for free, a few clicks away on the internet (Samurize, Fiddler).
A HUD (Heads Up Display) […]

Looking through the archive of blog posts, I can see that I mentioned various tools for Xpath construction, but none for CSS selectors in Selenium. Let’s change that now… Firefinder helps you test your css selectors and XPath statements before committing them to Selenium code.

I use XPather to help me write my automated tests, and other people seem to like XPath Checker. But today I needed something a little harder hitting and something which didn’t sit in the browser to help me write some batch processing xml tests. I found SketchPath, a fantastic free .net written tool.

The following contains a true life summary of some recent testing to illustrate the use of Fiddler and some test thinking in action.
I know I have mentioned Fiddler 2 before and how I could not test web sites without it (OK, so I could but I’d use something like BurpSuite instead), but I like Fiddler […]

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 […]

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 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]

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 […]

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]

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 […]