Technical Testing

TLDR; We can only test to the level supported by our Ability, and the degree to which we are supported by tooling to Observe, Interrogate and Manipulate the System.

This is a collation of edited older posts on Fiddler, explaining how I usee it to bypass restrictive proxy settings for tool configuration, remove headers, change browser verbs when accessing pages.

Turning off JavaScript is becoming more important than ever because so many sites are JavaScript heavy. Many sites use JavaScript as their protection mechanism to paywall content and prevent spam. Testing these without JavaScript enabled is important.

During the investigation of a CounterString GitHub search issue, I noticed that the search button displayed for the form I was using did not trigger the search functionality when pressed. In this post I investigate that.

When we find a bug in a system we have to make sure we can isolate it and also reduce the risk that our approach caused the bug, rather than the system having a bug.

TLDR: When we use multiple tools and existing tool features, we open up new options in how we approach our testing. This can help us identify workarounds when we identify testability feature requests, and might even remove the need for the testability feature.

I set myself a Practice Test Exercise. You might want to try it yourself before reading the full text of this post.

TLDR; Testing driven by technical understanding seeks to observe at multiple levels of the application stack and the testing conducted is informed by identifying risks in a model built by observing the application below the GUI.

I created a short live exploratory testing video using Orange HRM

The video is on YouTube and ad free via Patreon (along with many more exclusive videos and content).

TLDR; Use a combination of tools to offset other tools weaknesses. Insomnia makes switching HTTP proxies easier than Postman when performing exploratory testing

TLDR; When you learn to manipulate the DOM with JavaScript you can create simple tools and automate from within the browser and use bookmarklets to make the code easy to execute and sync across different machines.

TLDR; Frameworks implement an abstraction layer so we don’t have to bother about it. But, what if the implementation is doing stuff you don’t want? How do you know? Find tools that let you observe inside. WebPageTest.org does that for web pages.