QA Tools that make life easier.

Hello, I will be glad to share with you a few interesting tools that I use in QA work to make developer’s life a little bit more difficult.

As we all know developer’s life is hard. But we have QA to make it harder. We try to find problems or break something that developer has created. Let me tell you about tools that help me with it in manual web application testing.

To start with, the browser is the main tool which WEB QA uses for his work.

I prefer two browsers and they are Google Chrome and Safari. Google Chrome(GC) is a good choice because it’s popular and it has a huge amount of different plugins but it’s a little bit heavy for the system. Another one is Safari, it’s very fast for web surfing, but it doesn’t have as many useful plugins as GC. Regarding the rest of less popular browsers such as Opera or IE we have a great service “BrowserStack”. There’s more information about it down below.

As you have already understood, the main tool when it comes to torturing tasks is GC. Let me tell you in details about plugins and valuable things for QA work:

Well, Plugins.

What is helpful?

  • Page load time

    • Very simple plugin – that shows you time of page load with all details.

  • Сheck my links

    • It will help you to find broken links. It is a little bit slow but it can crawl through your web page and look for broken links.

  • Edit this cookie

    • Works with cookies. You can add, delete, edit, search, protect and block cookies.

  • Clear cache

    • In any incomprehensible situation you should clean cache. That is the first commandment of a QA. Clear cache plugin helps you with it making your browser clean.

  • Perfect Pixel

    • This is an awesome tool for mocking over a frontend developer. It will help you and your designers’ team to watch developer’s buttheart meanwhile you can check correspondence markups and layouts.

  • JS errors notifier

    • Useful plugin which helps you not to miss JS errors. It notifies you about JavaScript errors by showing an icon in toolbar or notification popup.

  • Magento Form Filler

    • Plugin uses dummy data for one user, but you can add more users and customize their data on settings page. Thanks Serhiy Zhovnir for sharing it.

Let it be all useful plugins that I use in my work. But we have also a few more helpful default browser features we can’t miss.

Browser default functionality

  • Developer console – where you can find js errors, lost images (404 errors) and warnings. Interesting requests that are sent to the server in the result of your actions which you can see in the network tab. For sure, I’ve mentioned not all of the effective features of “browser developer console”. Take this into account and learn all its opportunities, it’s a really great tool for testing.

  • Toodle device toolbar is the light version of testing markup and view store on different screen resolutions. Please note results could be different on real device.

Web aplications

Also I’d like to share with you some interesting web applications I use:

  • https://www.magereport.com/

    • Lately, Magento has been releasing security patches more often. To be in trend and not to miss any security issue on your store this service will be useful to check your Magento website for known problems.

  • https://www.browserstack.com – from $99/ month

    • It’s a must-have tool for super perfectionist QA. The application gives you an opportunity to test website using almost all known browsers and devices. In case you want to come to the developer and to tell him website does not look good on IE6, service will help you with that.

    But to be a little bit serious, most of the customers are using browsers on the Windows platform and the result could differ between the Google Chrome on Linux, Mac OS or Windows. Also, taking into accounts analytics only, you can notice that a huge part of customers use MS EDGE during placing an order. So, It is very important to check your frontend part of the website on different browsers/devices along with it.

  • https://10minutemail.com/

    • The service will give you a temporary email, which lasts 10 minutes. Any e-mails sent to that address will show up automatically on the web page. You can read them, click links, and even reply to them. The e-mail address will expire after 10 minutes.

  • https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/
  • https://search.google.com/test/mobile-friendly
  • https://search.google.com/structured-data/testing-tool/

    • Thanks to Big Bro Google for the great applications for testing website for speed, mobile-friendly and structured data.

Mobile/tablet testing

  • iOS simulator

    • In continuing tablet and mobile web application testing. You can use the wonderful simulator in XCode app for Mac OS. You can find all types of iOS devices.

    xCode app for MacOS list of divices emulators

  • Android simulator

    • For testing web applications on Android you can use NoxPlayer
    or Bluestacks that is available for PC or Mac.

Screen capture

When you want to prove developer that it is bug, but not a feature. Screen capture software can help you.

  • Snagit

    • For me the best screen capture application is Snagit($49.95). You can capture anything on your screen and then edit it in a few clicks and share result in email/cloud/FTP or document.

  • Jing

    • Not bad and free screen capture software.

Auto acceptance tests

Also do not forget about automation tests that can help you in different situations.

What other tools are you using for testing website usability? Let us know in the comments below.

Happy Testing!