Evil Tester

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 […]

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).

A tale of VMWare vs VirtualPC
One issue that I have with selenium and running tests through IE is the little popup dialog saying “The web page you are viewing is trying to close the window. do you want to close this window?”
Our tests use openWindow and then close them frequently.
I wrote a little AutoIt […]