Share your favourite tool and explain why – 30 Days of Tools, Day 1

📆 30 Days of Testing
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playwright. Wonderful community behind this awesome joyful tool.

Vysor. Helps me quickly go through a test case scenario on mobile phone and tablets

Youtube. I like to watch and learn. So many wonderful people willing to share their knowledge. <3

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For me using Miro for lots of things, such as a retro board as well as exploratory testing mind maps. Could do with some improvements in exporting but overall a very good tool that delivers a lot!

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Well for me the order is:

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What tool brings you joy?
Charles Proxy, I like mocking APIs.

What’s the one tool you go to that is a pleasure to use and helps you solve problems
VS Code, Git, javascript, webdriverIO - I like automation

What tool helps you be a better tester?
Chrome Dev Tools, there is still so much to learn there

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I agree, Excel is one of the best tools , may it be for data analysis , software test reports(bug, test cases) and many more.

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  • What tool brings you joy?
    Toggle Timer. Use this tool for years to track time I spend on different activities. When we moved from office to remote location it helps me to keep work-life balance and track my working time. In office it was simple by just knowing when you come into office. But it might be not so obvious when you work from home. Highly recommend!

  • What’s the one tool you go to that is a pleasure to use and helps you solve problems
    If talk about problem solving then it might be browsers DevTools and Fiddler. But it is definitely the question of the problem nature. It also might be some tool from Sysinternals Suite.

  • What tool helps you be a better tester?
    Postman, Telerik Fiddler.

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  • What tool brings you joy?
    Postman
    While being a rather complex tool with tons of functions for api creation and testing,
    you can tell that so much went into designing it and they took so much care to make it easy to use.
    That makes it a joy to use.

  • What’s the one tool you go to that is a pleasure to use and helps you solve problems
    SelectorsHub
    This makes creating robust web element selectors a breeze. Cannot recommend enough.

  • What tool helps you be a better tester?
    LogExpert
    This is a very useful log viewing tool, that makes digging through log files a bit easier.
    And you can add your own rules for highlighting certain patterns.

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** What tool brings you joy?**

Pen and paper for when I’m planning and thinking.
Postman - as well as being a useful tool with lots of functionality it also has great support and resources for learning available. I recently did the 30 days of Postman Challenge and learnt loads.

** What’s the one tool you go to that is a pleasure to use and helps you solve problems**

VS Code really helps me with coding

** What tool helps you be a better tester**

My ears for listening and my brain for analysing

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  1. Testery (https://testery.io) brings me the most joy (I’m the Founder). It brings me the most joy because we’ve put a lot of work into it and it’s awesome to see customers get really excited about having test runs that are faster and more reliable. Or it’s cool to see them shocked when we can run > 500 end-to-end tests in parallel for them.

  2. Python. I’m more comfortable in other languages, but for some reason Python keeps coming up as a quick, easy, and clean way of doing whatever I’m trying to get done (automating tests, writing a CLI wrapper around an API, implementing an automation between two systems, …)

  3. Webdriver.io REPL . It’s a really great way to try out code before putting it into a test. This way you can experiment with different approaches until you find something that’s really clean and works.

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The tool that brings me a ton of joy, is atext for mac / texter for windows. It’s a text expander tool, that allows me to save small workflows (including key presses) to automate long cli commands I can’t always remember, inputting test credit card information, and test session templates.

My go-to tool to help solve problems is https://app.diagrams.net/ formerly draw.io. If you’ve attended the Automation in Testing Workshop you’ve probably heard the phrase make it pointable. This tool allows me to quickly diagram a workflow or system, and have a shared document to fully understand a flow between product, dev, and test. I’ve been in a ton of situations, where as soon as we diagram the problem out , the solution becomes super clear.

The tool that helps me become a better tester is a collection of tools within my team’s Ruby Test Automation Framework. Utilizing the automated tooling we’ve built frees me up to troubleshoot/maintain our automation scripts more efficiently, run our automation against any of our test environments, mark specs as known issues linking bug tickets, calculate API endpoint coverage, and much more. I’ll be presenting at test.bash(); sharing about this framework more in-depth.

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What tool brings you joy?
Visual Studio - makes my job of maintaining 40+ automation repos easier and has all the plugins I need to write.
What’s the one tool you go to that is a pleasure to use and helps you solve problems
Browser Dev Tools - easiest way to prove to a dev something isn’t working!
What tool helps you be a better tester?
Postman - the chaining, environment variables and scripting features permit easy to sharing data across a large group of endpoints. Insomnia is a close second but not as user-friendly

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I have a pretty minimal list of tools, so far, but I would say…
Joy - Window’s Snip & Sketch program has gotten pretty good and it helps me provide documentation of issues or even just quickly take and toss a reference picture I need temporarily.
Problem Solver - I started out in QA without any technical expertise, and W3Schools has helped me learn how to do SQL queries that make my life easier.
Better Tester - MOT’s resources have helped me think outside my day-to-day work, learn how others approach QA, and be more forward-thinking.

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What tool brings you joy?

  • TextExpander - Setup shortcuts to expand text (write stuff or do stuff for you). I use to do manual tasks such as creating test accounts tabbing through forms, running deployments, generating random phone numbers, bug / defect / Jira ticket templates.

What’s the one tool you go to that is a pleasure to use and helps you solve problems

  • Slack - Great for integrations. We’ve created our own add ons for brithday celebrations and anonymous shout outs

What tool helps you be a better tester?

  • Cypress Studio - Recent version of Cypress has built in test generation / record feature which safes a lot of time writing out tests in code. Helps hit the ground running.
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  • What tool brings you joy?
    I enjoy using VSCode to write automation code. Great intelli-sense and navigation, and is very light-weight.

  • What’s the one tool you go to that is a pleasure to use and helps you solve problems
    I use this pomodoro clock to keep me focused and can timebox certain tasks. And then I can take a quick break, and get back at it.

  • What tool helps you be a better tester?
    I enjoy using TestCafe and WebdriverIO as they are easy to use test automation frameworks, with simple syntax and great online documentation. I haven’t had too many hard issues when trying to automation UI tests with them.

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So myself, and @friendlytester have started doing a live stream each working day to go through each challenge (Come join us for chats when you can! We’re aiming for 12:30pm BST each day) and I’ve dropped a link to the discussion we had along with others in the community.

But the tl;dr is that I picked Postman for my #1 tool, as I find I’m using it on a fairly regular basis. Have a watch and see my reasoning along with @friendlytester pick:

Also, feel free to share video diaries / livestreams as well!!!

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*** What tool brings you joy?**
Playwright, I enjoy finding the way to pass some test, and I can play hours and hours in it.

  • What’s the one tool you go to that is a pleasure to use and helps you solve problems
    I think excel, I can compare, create files to test, take notes, etc…

  • What tool helps you be a better tester?
    Teams, and Slack, they help me to strengthen my communication skills.

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  • What tool brings you joy? - Microsoft Teams - Helps in communicating with my team
  • What’s the one tool you go to that is a pleasure to use and helps you solve problems - Excel - I use it a lot for data gathering and analysis
  • What tool helps you be a better tester? - Rational DOORs, Python, POSTMAN - all have helped in a lot of critical situations
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*** What tool brings you joy?**
Greenshot - free screenshot / snipping tool & editor. I use it for everything.

*** What’s the one tool you go to that is a pleasure to use and helps you solve problems.**
W3Schools, MoT, Pluralsight - Tools that educate

*** What tool helps you be a better tester?**
Other people! Listening to how they want things to work, or how they have done things in the past… I find listening to other people increases my knowledge and understanding.

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What tool brings you joy?

Playwright Test, the new runner has been an absolute joy to use. The Trace Viewer has been a game-changer in terms of debugging and eradicating those annoying flaky tests.

What’s the one tool you go to that is a pleasure to use and helps you solve problems

Anything observability or reporting related, lately is has been DataDog. Their CI integration is going to allow us to better understand where most of our failures come from and where we can spend out limited time more efficiently.

What tool helps you be a better tester?

In the broadest sense of the word - Twitter. It is been great for me to stay up to date with developments in the testing world. Following people are trendsetters in the area is constantly giving me ideas that I can implement in my day-to-day.

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Visual Studio Code. I use it for most of my development work now, and it’s highly extensible and configurable, can help with a fair bit of testing (depending on the project), can handle a lot of git actions quite nicely, and is just surprisingly lightweight compared to the older options

Ugh, probably gonna have to go with VS Code again. I generally enjoy working with it, and when I pick it up, it’s usually to solve some problem or other :joy:

A tough one, there’s a few. I’d say Sitespeed, when I remember to use it properly, is a goldmine of front-end performance and accessibility information. I feel we’ll become a lot more reliant on it in the future and it’s a properly awesome bit of kit.

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