Evil Tester

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 [...]

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 [...]

I once did an experiment to see how easy I could wrap HTMLUnit with  Selenium for automated software testing. In my experiment I created a wrapper by extending the DefaultSelenium class and then using eclipse to create wrapper functions for all the methods. Then inject that HTMLUnitSelenium class into my abstraction layer and voila – [...]

Much as I appreciate the conciseness, usefulness and elegance of Regular Expressions; I just don’t use them enough to have mastered them or keep the rules in my memory. I used to rely on “Mastering Regular Expressions”, which I still find very useful. But I registered RegexBuddy about a year ago when I found myself [...]

This evening I downloaded and started experimenting with Selenium-Grid when I looked down at my TaskBar and I got lost. I had too many File Explorer window open, and too many command line windows open. Something had to change. Step in UltraExplorer, and Console2.