Evil Tester

First I used XPather, then it was FireFinder, and since neither of those seems particularly compatible with the most recent versions of Firefox… I now use FirePath. FirePath operates as a Firebug extension and provides a handy “Inspect in FirePath” context menu entry. FirePath handles XPath, CSS and JQuery selectors. I don’t have any spare [...]

There I am, figuring out how to debug my FitNesse automation from within eclipse. And up pops the Firefox ‘update failed dialog’ and interfering with my automation. A bane and a pain when using Selenium RC. But with WebDriver there are easy ways round this. Start firefox with a profile and set the "app.update.silent" firefox [...]

This tutorial on Burp Suite covers the Repeater and Intruder functionality. Repeater allows you to play back a message to the server and amend it before it goes out. Intruder allows you to play back messages, with various elements of the message varying with each playback e.g. a different set of parameters In the tutorial [...]

In March 2011 I gave a talk at the London Sigist on technical testing. I’ll make the slides for that available (…sometime soon). I didn’t want to give a ‘blaggers guide’ to technical testing. So I presented an overview of some of the thought processes and models I use. At the end of the talk [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]