Testing software takes time, but there are many ways to shorten the time to make your job more fun. We have created a list of some of the tools we find interesting and use in our everyday testing.
We organized the tools in a couple of different sections for easier review.
Manual Testing
Although we use a lot of automation to make testing faster and more reliable, manual testing is a big part of our process. Our team has the mindset there is no good automated testing without manual testing.
Here are some of the tools in our manual testing arsenal.
Desktop apps
- Spectacle/Moom — Easily move and resize windows. These tools are super convenient and allow you to test how responsive a webpage is without leaving the keyboard.
- Monosnap — This is a free screenshot and video making tool available on both Windows and Mac. It includes pen, text, arrow, and shape tools so you can mark up an image to call attention to a bug. You can also crop images and blur out sensitive information.
- LICEcap — Don't worry about the weird name, this is a useful tool for recording .gifs. There are times when screenshots fail to tell the whole story, and being able to quickly record a .gif from your desktop speeds up the process of sharing issues with your team.
- Postman — This is one of the best API testing tools out there. It makes it quick and easy to test an API. You can set up a profile to save collections with your API calls, including your keys, so you can quickly run through a manual test of your API.
- Alfred — A launcher app for MacOS. It's awesome because it makes it easy to carry out tasks without leaving your keyboard. There's a free version and a paid version that includes the ability to build and use custom workflows. There is a big community building additional workflow integrations, so someone may have built the workflow you need already if it doesn't support the task you need out of the box.
Free online tools
There are a lot of free online tools which are awesome and very easy to use. Some of the most valuable for us testers are:
- http://www.webatic.com — This tool includes all sorts of conversions, character sets, and response tests that would take up a ton of time if you needed to generate them on your own all the time. We use this tool almost daily, especially testing Postmark.
- http://json.parser.online.fr— A great, quick JSON parser. Copy your JSON and paste it into instantly parse it as a string and get a JS evaluation.
- http://jsonschema.net — A JSON schema generator. We use it a lot to generate JSON when we're writing API tests.
- http://jsonlint.com — At first glance, this tool might look similar to the JSON parser I mentioned earlier. The difference is JSONLint provides better errors when you validate larger JSON data sets.
- https://github.com/ibalosh/sinhook — Simple tool for testing webhooks. This tool needs to be setup locally, however if you would like to use a public tool, you can use https://requestbin.com.
- http://httpstat.us — We use this when we want to test something like invalid webhooks. If you call http://httpstat.us/500 with an API, it will return a 500 error. The return http code (in this case 500) depends on what you enter. If you enter http://httpstat.us/200 it will return 200. This is really handy if I want to see whether or not I can save a webhook returning a 500 error.
Paid online tools
In order to make testing easier, we use many paid web apps too. Some of the most important ones are:
- Librato — Our entire team loves this monitoring tool. We use it a lot for QA, and our Systems and Developer teams find it very helpful too. It powers a ton of internal charts from system data to help us stay on top of performance across all of our teams.
- BrowserStack — When you need to test a new feature or update across multiple browsers, this is a life saver. It's much better than having to maintain a lab of devices and virtual machines, or just hoping everything works across browsers.
- Litmus — As the proud makers of Postmark we care about email a lot. We use Litmus every day to make sure our emails live up to the Wildbit standard across multiple mail clients.
Browser plugins
Manual testing can be so much easier with browser plugins. Some of our favorites for Chrome and Firefox are:
- JSON formatter — Formats any JSON content online automatically. (Chrome)
- Firebug — We couldn't live without this one. Our team uses it constantly for testing responses, traffic, html/css code, and scripts. (Firefox)
- Web Developer — Cool tool that makes it easy to quickly enable or disable things like JS, CSS, cookies and so much more. (Firefox)
- Tab to Window — Handy Chrome extension with keyboard shortcuts for moving a tab to its own window. This one is especially useful when used alongside Spectacle. (Chrome, Firefox)
Automated testing tools
We use Ruby and Rails a lot. These are some of the gems we use daily when writing tests.
- RubyMine — This is our favorite Ruby and Rails IDE. It is so much more than an IDE, it will make you a better developer every day you use it.
- Pry — This alternative to Ruby IRB shell is an essential part of writing our automated tests.
- MailHandler — We built this gem to power our testing for sending and receiving email, along with capturing information about delivery.
- Page-object — If you've worked in QA for very long, you've probably heard of this one. We have to mention it, it's so good. It provides an elegant solution for modeling your webpages.
- Faraday — This is the HTTP client that we use for API automation tests.
Performance testing tools
We care a lot about the performance of our products at Wildbit, a couple of our favorite performance testing tools are:
- http://gatling.io — This is an open-source testing tool, ideal for testing from a single machine.
- http://jmeter.apache.org — This is a bit more resource demanding than Gatling and is ideal for testing from more than one machine.
Let us know what you use
These are only some of the tools we use at Wildbit, but they are definitely the most important ones. Which tools are you using to make testing more fun? Let us know!