Free Tools to Help with Your Everyday Software Testing Needs

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I read this a blog post about free tools to help with testing and help software testers

We have a few posts about tools already on the Club

But I was wondering what free* tools you would recommend to help software testers, QA people, developers, and others with software testing?

Note*: I say free meaning not tools that have a free trial. Tools that are 100% free or open source or have a fully free tier.

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I use a lot of mindmaps to keep my thoughts organized. For that: XMind.
Since my IoT application uses serial communication: Visual Studio community edition (C#)
Since I like Python for simple scripts, I have Visual Studio configured for Python as well.
I sometimes prefer to use Python’s Idle editor. (Got to be a habit when my sysadmin didn’t allow me to change things in a previous job)
For screenshots, I use Greenshot.
For editing screenshots (i.e. “Look at the problem HERE!”), Paint.net
For analyzing logs, Notepad++
For API tests, Postman

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  • Visual Studio Code: To create little python tools to help me while testing. Incredible free IDE from MS without eating too many resources as IntelliJ, Eclipse and the likes.
  • Postman: To first testing the services APIs before automating the API tests.
  • An online certificate decoder service like “sslshopper” to check the certificates dates, CNs, SANs, etc
  • An online JSON decoder, beautifier, uglify, etc service.
  • KeePass: Many users and passwords to remember :)…and the nice feature to “auto” input the user/password in the browser page!
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Free software that I use regularly as tester as like as for other tasks:
• Notepad++: for all files you may edit, esp. with XML-Tools (pretty-print!) by the way Notepad+ can replace many of the tools the author of the fifteen-free-tools blog post suggests!
• AutoIt: esp. for automating WIN-UI tasks like stepwise performance tests (automated testcase by compiling .exe)
• AutoHotkey: esp. for automated string manipulationg task in our bugtracking system
• Sikuli: for quick regression testing (as non-dev I could not find a easy solution to automate with other scripted tools due to many “black-box” components)
• GoldenDict: translating tool I use not primary for testing but for documentation and support tasks also with dictionaries created with babylon builder on my own to have immediately access to things like our products terms (translations) database, internal IDs to descriptive terms ect.
• TNTscreencapture: does what is says
• Bandicam: for creating short screen videos, but as freeware with watermark
• DiffPDFportable: already saved a lot of time (but to admint rarely used)
• Sysinternals Suite: indispensable with tools like perfmon, PsExec, zoomit, autoruns, Bginfo
• www.di.fm: can help a lot to make your brain stay focused on track :wink:(e.g. with Chillout dreams; Nightcore)

regards
Mathias

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I am pretty sure @FriendlyTester had a exploratory test helper app at some point being promoted - anyone got the link?
Sorry for the necro.