What’s one thing you like about a tool you no longer use?

🙋 Questions
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Tools support our day-to-day testing efforts. And sometimes we find a set of tools in the right context that make our work lives much easier.

And sometimes we have to deal with a tool we’re unsure of. The one you have to use but probably don’t want to. Perhaps it’s the one that just gets in the way. The one tool we’d rather be rid of yet are unable to banish into the halls of tool history.

However, for those tools you’re no longer using — either by choice or circumstance or something else – what’s one thing you like about a tool you no longer use?

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I used to do a lot of useful thing with VBA in Excel. Have not opened excel in years.

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Interesting question! A team I was on from 2003 - 2012 used FitNesse for ATDD with service-level tests. What we loved about it was that it forced us testers and coders to collaborate with each other. A tester would write a happy path FitNesse test for a story, then a coder would write the prod code that should make it pass. Often, if it failed, it was because the coder had a different understanding of desired behavior than the tester, so it was time to bring in the product owner or other stakeholder and have a conversation…

Nowadays, I use Matt Wynne’s example mapping in pre-iteration planning meetings or story readiness workshops to get this kind of shared understanding. Lots of ways to do it.

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powershell - not used it much for about 3 years now. Mainly just due to circumstance as my job moved to mobile and embedded. It’s an unusual scripting language that is sometimes too powerful for it’s own good, because it can be frustratingly easy to get started with and also easy to get confused by too. But I loved the ability to turn it to almost any task you could imagine, literally.

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For me, it was the GitHub Desktop app. IT had a handy UI, but I just stopped using it when I changed laptops and haven’t looked back too much. The main reason is that now most IDEs and editors have git integrations, so even if you don’t memorize the terminal commands for git you can still use a GUI for most typical version control use cases.

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I used to love using Beyond Compare, if there were a few of us working on the same document I found it easy to see what was changed via running the two versions through BC - or similarly worked a treat when working with data (but this was all before I got to grips with collaboration tools and excel formulas :slight_smile: )

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