+1 for huddles!
They’ve been a game changer for my teams Slack usage, we use them extensively!
5 Likes
Cypress - I have only recently started using it but find it much easier to use than other tools I have used in the past.
Google and Chrome Dev Tools
My brain 
5 Likes
My favourite one is https://pairwise.yuuniworks.com/ It is not that fancy looking, but I like the functionality and ability to use conditions
3 Likes
- What tool brings you joy?
Meme Generator, to create fun memes about everyday work topics.
Mindmup2.0, to quickly set up some testing ideas aka plans.
- What’s the one tool you go to that is a pleasure to use and helps you solve problems
An internal tool that provides the function to simulate different user keys for the registration process of the SUT.
- What tool helps you be a better tester?
The Testsphere cards to come up with more ideas to test. And Mindmup2.0 again, to help me stay focused on the testing activities.
4 Likes
Well, I’m a day late in my responding. I really have enjoyed reading everyone’s responses here. I’ve certainly learned about a great many new tools.
What tool brings you joy?
Hmm, I can’t say any tool brings me joy. At least not in the computer world. Closest thing would probably my motorcycle. There’s nothing quite like hitting the open road on two wheels.
What’s the one tool you go to that is a pleasure to use and helps you solve problems?
This would probably be Intellij IDEA. I’m fortunate enough to have my company spring for the Universal edition, so I use it extensively.
What tool helps you be a better tester?
Jira. Everyone has their favorites, everyone has an opinion. Personally I really like the Atlasian suite and Jira really helps my team in general, and me personally, stay on track. I try to make sure coders are documenting stuff in Jira tickets and cards are moving where they need to be. I create testplans in Confluence, and the ability to hot link the two together is awesome. I do a better job with these tools.
4 Likes
What tool brings you joy?
Right now it would be visual regression tools, currently using Saucelabs Visual. Automates a lot of the visual regression away allowing myself and the team to focus on more exploratory testing
What’s the one tool you go to that is a pleasure to use and helps you solve problems?
Python, a great language that I have been using to assist me in all aspects of my testing. An easy language to learn and I have been using it for the last 15 years to solve a lot of testing problems
What tool helps you be a better tester?
My brain 
for exploratory testing, and will be my go to tool for the foreseable future
4 Likes
-
What tool brings you joy?
SQL Server Management Studio (or SQL in general I guess). I get simple joy from messing with test data in the background to make stuff happen. -
What’s the one tool you go to that is a pleasure to use and helps you solve problems
Chrome dev tools (the magic F12 key!). Use it daily for figuring out what is going wrong in the browser. -
What tool helps you be a better tester?
Slack. I use it with my team for communication (including calls, posting videos of bugs, polls for planning team social activities - it’s great, especially now we have’nt seen each other for over 2 months).
Slack also connects me to fellow testers locally (with our Auckland channel) and internationally and I learn so much from them.
4 Likes
Thanks @aikibear for sharing this tool. I just thought this tool would be beneficial for some of my test cases where I spend too much time to create.
3 Likes
- I started using a new terminal app recently called Warp. It has been fun to use and has some handy features most other terminals do not have like clear separation of commands and great suggestions.
- I really enjoy using mind maps to help plan out feature areas, and it allows me to structure the problem and test strategy better.
- Asking questions makes me a better tester and is a hugely useful tool.
4 Likes
- What tool brings you joy?
Python, hands down, I love writing it, I love learning more about it, I use it all the time.
- What’s the one tool you go to that is a pleasure to use and helps you solve problems
PyCharm, because it makes writing Python even easier and more fun.
What tool helps you be a better tester?
The Calm app, which gives me guided meditations which remind me to think and not just react.
3 Likes
What tool brings you joy?
I find some of the most simple tools the best, and as such I have a lot chrome extensions. I have dyspraxia and it can be quite difficult for me to tell if objects are aligned or not, grid ruler is perfect for this. It gives me confidence that a bug I am seeing is actually a bug.
What’s the one tool you go to that is a pleasure to use and helps you solve problems?
This has been mentioned a lot, but visual studio code. The number of extensions are insane and you can use them for anything. When I am writing my automation scripts I find the help tools (for example Cypress references) incredibly useful and it is easy to see where I may have syntax issues.
What tools help you be a better tester?
Without my testing toolkit, I am not sure I would be a worse tester, but I would certainly be a slower one. Here is a list of some of the free ones I use:
Visual Studio Code https://code.visualstudio.com/
Grid Ruler Grid Ruler - Chrome Web Store
Word Diff Checker https://www.diffchecker.com/
Dummy Text Generator || Dummy Text Generator | Lorem ipsum for webdesigners ||
Facebook Pixel Helper Facebook Pixel Helper - Chrome Web Store
JS Paint https://jspaint.app/
Resolution Test Resolution Test - Chrome Web Store
4 Likes
For Joy, I would say Email on acid. It has allowed me to be more in depth with design checks for customer-facing emails, and I have even used the template function to create my own QA email that I sent to my Team.
For help to solve problems, it’s hard to pick one, as all the tool I use help solve some issue. I suppose if I had to choose one, I would go with developer tools. Being able to inspect elements and make changes using the console greatly help on some of the more complex tickets I worked on.
The tool that makes me a better tester, I would say Postman. Beginning API testing is a fantastic introduction into how things are structured and also has opened me up to non-functional testing
4 Likes
- What tool brings you joy?
Tools don’t bring me joy per se, they help me do my work better and that brings me joy. I love a tool that makes my life easier. I love a tool that gives me information. I love tools that show me what’s underneat the surface.
They solve my problems, and that brings me joy.
- What’s the one tool you go to that is a pleasure to use and helps you solve problems
I love Postman as a tool. Not only can I use it as a shortcut in my testing, it also helps me in automation and it helps me do exploratory testing on APIs. It’s incredible that this one tool can help me on so many levels.
- What tool helps you be a better tester?
For this question I have to say DevTools. No matter what I’m testing, I always want to see what’s going on. It helps me deterime how data gets pushed around. Even if it’s only a partial view, it’s so readily available and clear. This made me a better tester and I’m not done learning how to use it!
4 Likes
Q What tool brings you joy?
A Kibana. I love the rich visualizations and dashboards you can create to view user and system logs
Q What’s the one tool you go to that is a pleasure to use and helps you solve problems
A Chrome Developer Tools. I use the console constantly for debugging code, the inspector for determining DOM tags, and the Network for troubleshooting errors and simulating different types of connections.
Q What tool helps you be a better tester?
A These are not so much tools but resources. testautomationu.com has been hands-down the best place for me to learn more about test automation as well as Joe Colantonio’s podcasts. As mentioned by others, Postman is a great tool for learning more about the APIs I am testing.
3 Likes
-
What tool brings you joy?
IntelliJ, Visual Studio or PyCharm, because green check marks provide joy. -
What’s the one tool you go to that is a pleasure to use and helps you solve problems
That depends on the problems I am solving. -
What tool helps you be a better tester?
Slack! It allows me to learn from those who have solved similar problems or have more experience in a particular area.
4 Likes
Most of my notes around this days challenge can be found in the following blog post:
What tool brings you joy?
I like to talk about test automation in general - especially those related to UI automation. UI Automation is notoriously flaky so the challenge of getting them working is a fun one to complete. Developing UI Automated Tests is like trying to solve a Sudoku puzzle. You get one wrong number and the entire thing will go wrong. In UI Automation, you need to make sure each individual step works correctly. If a single step breaks, then the entire test is broken. Debugging a failing test, searching for that single point of failure is so much fun.
What’s the one tool you go to that is a pleasure to use and helps you solve problems
The greatest tool we can use is simple pen and paper. I've already mentioned that Test Automation development is like trying to solve a puzzle - being able to scratch out notes and ideas on a pen and paper is the best way to solve the puzzle. You can do so much with pen and paper - doodling (helps with mental health), scribble down notes and ideas, create a checklist so you don't forget something ...
Most of my best ideas started out as indecipherable scribbles on a piece of paper.
What tool helps you be a better tester?
Test Automation tools help us be better testers by providing confidence that areas of the application not known to be directly impacted by the change work as expected. This provides us with more time to focus on the areas that we know are directly impacted. These are the areas that are most likely to contain bugs so it only makes sense to target more testing to this area.
4 Likes
Better late than never, so here it goes
-
What tool brings you joy?
I cannot say any tool brings me joy per se but let’s say currently I enjoy watching those green checkmarks in iTerm2 (command line program). -
What’s the one tool you go to that is a pleasure to use and helps you solve problems
Some of the problems I am solving through GoLand IDE and some of the problems I’m solving through Slack, naturally. -
What tool helps you be a better tester?
Web browser for content like this one at MoT, as well as Slack for sharing knowledge with colleagues.
3 Likes
Late to the party, but…
- What tool brings you joy?
I’ve really been enjoying playing around with GitLab CI recently. It’s a lot more linear than similar tools like GitHub Actions or Jenkins, but their docs are excellent and the complex logic you can build using their templating and rules functionality is really impressive. Shameless plug for my recent blog post on this topic!
- What’s the one tool you go to that is a pleasure to use and helps you solve problems?
DevTools (in whatever browser I happen to be using) is an absolute life-saver for frontend testing - there’s so much hidden information happening that powers the rendering (and re-rendering) of each page, but DevTools lets you uncover all of it. As frameworks like React and Vue (where more and more of the business logic lives in the browser) become increasingly popular, it’s becoming more important to know my way around the various tabs in DevTools so I can pin down bugs and understand the potential root causes of anything that seems weird or inconsistent.
- What tool helps you be a better tester?
As a moderator I guess I’m biased, but… the MoT Slack! So many knowledgeable and helpful people all in one place, offering their time and expertise for free!
3 Likes
I currently love GitHub actions and I enjoy changing my own repositories to use GitHub actions to execute cypress or testcafe tests.
- I would say Google Chrome Developer Tools/Inspector. It helps to find selectors, check console errors and in general to have a good way to inspect the UI
- SnagIt → I can make amazing screenshots but even better I record a short screen capture and save it as a gif for our internal documentation. Words can describe a lot but nothing is better than a short gif to show something or explain something
3 Likes
- What tool brings you joy?
Postman
It is a whole world to discover for api testing from a very friendly interface, it has two incredible challenges that allow knowing each of the functionalities present in it:
Postman Student Expert Program
30 Days of Postman
After these, it is impossible not to love it. - What’s the one tool you go to that is a pleasure to use and helps you solve problems?
Log4j
With this tool I make sure to keep track of the automated tests in Java, it solves my life quite a bit knowing exactly where in the executed test I am and where an execution error can occur. - What tool helps you be a better tester?
Chrome Dev Tools
When I started as a manual tester I didn’t have a better Chrome DevTools coworker, with this tool I could know exactly what was happening under each action I performed in the browser, I could check requests and responses, the html of the web page under review, the console with all the errors at the front level and much more
4 Likes