Useful tools for QA execution

As time goes by, you will end up knowing a lot of tools you used for test execution and a lot of testing types, I'm going to tell you what I have used and still use and the benefits of this tools on different types of testing.

First of all, when you log a bug you need to add an evidence to the bug, most of the people use regular screen captures to do this, however, there are a lot of great tools to use for screen capture, one of them is called Jing, which is a tool that allows you to add text and indicators to the screen capture you have, there's a similar tool called Snagit, it does the same thing, I prefer Jing. Now, you may come across to transactions or functional bugs and a lot of screenshots is not a best practice, Jing has a video functionality, but it saves it on .swf format which makes the video really big to upload, I personally use a tool called LiceCap, this is a great record and play tool which saves .gif images that can be used as videos that every browser can reproduce and they are not as big as the ones saved by Jing. That being said, if you want to record videos from a mobile device, you'll want to use Quicktime and plug you device to the computer, then record what's on your device by selecting it and just use LiceCap while you do what you want on Quicktime, it's the best thing to record actions in real time on a real device.

Now let's talk about execution, depending on what you are doing or what types of tests you will execute, there are a lot of tools for this, for instance on accessibility testing you can use Wave which is a plugin for Chrome to test accessibility stuff, it's the first glance of how your website looks like in terms of accessibility, and you can use ChromeVox (another Chrome plugin) which is a screen reader, pretty similar, but for me better than Jaws, which is another screen reader tool, and it will help you find missing tags, alt text or no readability on the website. If you want to check links you can use another plugin called Link Checker (also on Chrome) or a tool called Xenu's Link Sleuth for Windows to check broken links. If you are looking for some way to do automated testing for the layout or look and feel (I prefer to do it manually), you can try a great tool called Ghost Inspector, this tool allows you to make assertions on some parts of the page and the next time you run the same test it will compare the initial one and highlight the differences, it's a really nice tool. In terms of automated testing and load testing, I really like to use Selenium and JMeter, but I'll talk about these tools in a later post, however in terms of measuring the load of a website you can use the network tab on the Web developer tool on both Chrome and Firefox.

Let's talk about Google Analytics, there are a lot of tools to use to check the events being fired, you can use the Google Tag Assistant plugin on Chrome, however, the best tool for me to test Google Analytics is a tool called DataSlayer, I really like that because it shows the events in the same window and you don't have to click multiple times to see the different events being fired, try it out, you'll find it really useful. Of course this tool works with the web developer tool used by Chrome, every QA that works on web stuff should use the element inspection a lot to see correct styles, padding, fonts, font sizes, etc.

This is only a first glance of the most common tools I use everyday but there are a lot more that you can use and will help you out to do a better job when testing stuff.

Apologies for not publishing a blog post last week, I was in a work trip and I couldn't find the time for new posts, I hope you are liking my blog, I'll be back after the holidays so the next post will be on January 9th, happy holidays to everyone

@LuchoAgileQA