Produce your own tool timeline – 30 Days of Tools, Day 25

It’s Day 25 of the 30 Days of Tools challenge. It’s time to step back in time to paint a history of the tools you’ve used.


Produce your own tool timeline

  • List the tools you’ve used in chronological order.
  • What were your favourites and in what context?
  • Get creative and draw your tool timeline e.g. use above and below a horizontal line to represent the highs and lows of your tools experience

Feel free to reply to this post and share wherever you like, on the MoT Slack, LinkedIn, Twitter using #30DaysOfTools, Racket, your blog, with your team and any place you feel might inspire yourself and others to do the same. Let’s learn from each other throughout October. Visit the 30 Days of Tools page and select the “Subscribe to Topic” button to receive each daily challenge direct to your inbox.


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It’s on October 28th, 10am-10pm UK time. Available with a Pro Subscription or you can purchase a ticket.

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I’ll try, purely testing tools & CI/CD:

  • Selenium
  • SoapUI
  • Postman
  • JMeter
  • Jenkins
  • Azure DevOps
  • ZAP
  • Burpsuite
  • Cypress

Burpsuite: intercepting requests and manipulating them/sending them to the intruder/repeater section.

I’m not that creative, but I’ll give it a go… to be continued… :stuck_out_tongue:

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C# and Coded UI in Visual Studio
C# with Ranorex
C# and Specflow with Visual Studio
F# and Canopy, with Visual Studio

Never liked Coded UI, only used it because it was the tool I was given. It was very early in my testing career, and my first attempt at developing automated tests. I was given very little encouragement to investigate alternative tools, and as it was very early on in my career it never even occurred to me that alternative tools were an option.

Ranorex was amazing to use and a lot of my colleagues with less programming experience found it useful due to its Record and Playback feature, which made it so much easier for novice programmers to develop automated tests. Ranorex has the best Record and Playback feature I’ve seen as it makes it easier to view and refactor the generated code.

Specflow is amazing. Its my favourite tool for developing automated tests mainly because of its use of gherkin language which makes understanding what the test does much easier. Just like record and playback, I’ve a fan of any tools that makes test automation code easier to understand. It makes it so much easier for testers new to test automation to understand the code, update existing tests and eventually work on writing new tests.

F# and Canopy is a very recent addition to my toolkit. I’ve only recently started exploring its capabilities. Its been a challenge as this will be the first time I’ve worked on writing automated tests in a different programming language.

Adaptability is the most important skill anyone can acquire. You never know when you’ll be asked to use a different tool. Having knowledge of similar tools will at least make the transition easier. If I hadn’t learnt Python a few years ago (which I did just for fun), I think I would have found the transition to F# a lot more difficult.

I’ll definitely have a go at this later, haven’t done any sketchnoting in a while and this seems like a good excuse. Watch this space…

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I limited my drawing to the test case management, bug tracking and, test automation tools I came across.

The dotted line shows the chronological order. The black lines connect the tools that have been used in combination. The higher up the better I like them.

As a newbie tester, back in the day, I started my journey with Tosca Testsuite and Jira.
After changing a job, I found myself in a position, where the test suite has been printed pages. The physical folder has then been substituted by Microsoft TestManager. And for one project there was a self-created tool for automation.
A bit later Ranorex Testsuite joined and with it AzureDevOps to replace MTM. The latest one is Xray Exploratory App as a recorder for exploratory test sessions.
And then there is Postman, just implied connected in grey. As I want to get into it, but got sidetracked after the installation.

I wasn’t always able to choose the tools by myself. Same as Louise, I had tools given to me or available in the company. Some I’d like more than others. I still have Tosca in good memory, but the last time I used it has been years ago.

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On the top of my head:

  1. Wrike
  2. Jira
  3. Developer Tools
    1.Atom, Brackets, VS Code
  4. Visual Studio
  5. Xray for Jira
  6. Testrail
  7. Postman
  8. JMeter
  9. InteliJ
  10. Bug Magnet

There’s a ton of more, but these are the first ones that come to mind.

I like HTTP clients as I use them a lot, either the one at the code level or UI based tools, for snooping around to learn more about the APIs I’m testing.

Uh-uh, I’ll try to figure something out as soon as I find the time. :smiley:

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  • Excel
  • Greasemonkey
  • Subversion
  • Git
  • Selenium
  • Cucumber
  • Junit
  • Postman
  • a test note tool I can’t remember
  • RestAssured
  • Geb
  • Spock
  • Wiremock
  • Insomnia
  • Charles Proxy
  • Playwright java
  • Playwright js

Favorite so far has been Wiremock. It has been very useful in speeding up testing for our team and automation.

I have barely enough time to type these up let alone draw my tool journey as a timeline lol. Maybe next time, but cool idea.

3 Likes