30 Days of Agile Testing, Day 20: What is in your toolkit?

For task 20 we are asked what is in ours and our teams toolkit.

My toolkit is pretty varied depending on what I’m doing on any given day:

  • Screen recorder (as I’ve mentioned before this is one of my biggest assets while testing), I use this every day!
  • Webdriverio with Mocha
  • ZAP
  • FoxyProxy (I use this with both ZAP and JMeter)
  • JMeter
  • Virtualbox (I make mistakes a lot, I like to be able to scrap Virtual Machines and start from scratch)
  • Docker (I’ve finally started this after I asked the question ages ago!) I’ve added this to the list for a similar reason to virtual box and it’s something fun and new to try.
  • Random string generator

I’m also guilty of forgetting to list tools because I use them so often I don’t think of them, they’re like second nature to me!

What is in your toolkit? Do you regularly do a tool change or do you rotate around a fixed set of tools?

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These are the tools I use on a near-daily basis:

  • Google Keep. I keep a daily to-do list, along with a long-term “honey-do” list there. The start of my day is visiting my to-do list for the day, the end of the day is me working out my to-do for the next day. It’s also great for sketching out short checklisty test plans, and being able to share with my team instantly is super super handy.
  • Uberconference. I’m fully remote, so I have a single point of contact set up for meetings. I have a slack reminder for standups, which contains the link to my Uberconference.
  • Skitch. There are other screen capture tools, but Skitch is quick, backs up to the cloud, lets me write notes on a screenshot fairly quickly.
  • Git. I feel like being able to do basic tasks with Git should be in every tester’s arsenal. I can see exactly who committed what code when to the repo. There’s been countless times I’m trying to find the developer who is responsible for a bug, and a simple search of “git log” found what I needed in a snap.
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Git, damn I forgot that off my list! I’ve also recently discovered Zoom for conferencing. It has worked great when the likes of Skype & Appear.in have failed.

Hmm, I feel a bit outgunned here. I work in the productmanagement department and I have no admin rights to get all these interesting tools installed. Unless they are in our standard IT tool list, I have to go through some troubling red tape. It took me a month to get an updated version of SOAPUI on that list. Luckily SQL Developer, Maven and Eclipse are standard. My next Sisyphean labour is an updated version of Fiddler. Luckily my dev team mates are always happy to help.

Surprised no-one’s mentioned Notepad++ yet, particularly with the XML and JSON plugins!

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Excel - For building test data

Text Editors - Notepad++ & Brackets. I use Brackets for Java/Groovy scripts in SoapUI.

Eclipse IDE - Building test tools using Java. E.g. I built a test suite that would call several key queries in our app and report (in HTML) the performance. I could then use the results against API performance results to identify overheads. I also write my Selenium tests using Java in this IDE.

SoapUI Pro - For API Testing, I use this a lot.

Postman - Quick API tries

JMeter - For Load Testing

SQL Developer - Forgot about this until I saw Dutch Dennis’ post.

JIRA - Issue & enhancement tracking

What should I use more? Probably Python. My desktop is locked down such that I can’t download Python libraries.

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Of course rse, Notepad++. I love the compare plugin. Open two files and check if they match.

@davewesterveld has shared his on his blog

Also, I’ve just seen both @maaret and @alan sharing on Twitter some tools from a talk they are attending






Loggly! I completely forgot about Loggly. Logging in our test environments goes to the same monitoring tools as production, so we have access to Loggly and can easily search logs and attach server logs to bug reports. If for some reason Loggly is down or behind, we have access to the raw logs on an rsyslog box.

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One more, Mockaroo! It takes me seconds to whip up useful .csv’s for importing into our product.

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