What Tools to Use to Test Better?

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Good morning

How are you feeling today?
This is the workshop about what tools you can use to test better. My name is Irina, I am a tester at Nortal for more than 7 years. I will tell you about front-end part, and later Rasmus will tell you about back-end. So my part may be a little bit boring especially for IT students, because they probably already know about DevTool and may be even about Postman. But we still need to talk about these basic staff just to be sure that everyone at least have heard of them.

The topic says “what tools to use”, but actually I will not name you some list of must-use tools and there isn’t one. The point is that you should know the possibilities and, may be, you shouldn’t be afraid to google for some ways to somehow automate your manual actions. Because using tools is a some kind of automation.

First of all, some organisational staff.

My part should last one and a half hour. We can do a little break in between, but only if you want. I will ask in 45 minutes about that and we will see what mood do you have then.

You can use Google during the workshop (or any favourite search engine). And you even should use Google. Because good worker, not only tester, can find the solution and the way to simplify that solution, by himself. That doesn’t mean that you can’t ask. But sometimes at work you don’t have right person for asking something.

We will have some practical exercises and you can do them by yourself or you can pair with someone. That’s completely up to you.

You can make all exercises in your favourite browser, but they were made for Chrome. And I will use Chrome in my demo.

So, let’s begin.

So front-end testing basically means testing in browser. There are different browsers, as you know. And for tester each browser is suitable for different purposes. For example, FireFox is the best for security testing, because it has a little default limitations and it has quite powerful addons and plugins. Internet Explorer is good for usability testing, because it doesn't always work properly with new features and frameworks that you may use in your product, but there are always some users that use Internet Explorer, so you need to be sure that your product works everywhere for every user. And Chrome is, I think, the most user friendly browser and it has a lot of nice extensions, so for many people it's just a default browser.

As I said, I will use Chrome and suggest you to use it too - just to be sure that all things work as expected.

So, this is the link of first exercise. It's very simple page with two input fields. And I give you about 5 minutes to just explore it. May be you will already find some bugs.

And in 5 minutes I will show you some tips about it.

Does anyone has any problems with opening this link?

And I recommend you to write some notes during your exploring. I will not ask about them, they are just for you. There is a common problem that if you explore something and find something interesting, you forget about it later. So it's a very good habit to make notes, just to be sure that all suspicious things will be analysed and processed later.

So, explore..

// 5 minutes

// If they ask about fields: text field is for names, number field is for age

Do you want 5 minutes break?

Here is the link to the exercise number 2. It’s the same, except for the number here.

You have similar very simple page. And, again, I give you 5 minutes to test these 2 fields.

// 5 minutes

And the final part is about REST services, or, actually, about Postman. How many of you have used Postman?

Here is the link for the third exercise. It’s some kind of sandbox for testing REST services. You can find different services with different methods there and we will use them to explore Postman.

So REST services basically transfer data between server and client or between different servers. And they are looking just like regular URL, but when you call this URL you don’t have back a HTML page, but you have some data, usually in JSON or XML format.

Example: http://httpbin.org/get

The point of this workshop was to get you some taste about front-end testing tools. I hope you liked it.

What Tools to Use to Test Better?

Irina Ivanova

What Tools to Use to Test Better?