Five Essential Tool Categories Every Tester Should Learn

Becoming tool-aware is an important skill for all testing/QA professionals. Yet how do you know what tools to learn? How do you keep up with the latest trends and how might you future-proof your skillset? Read about five essential tool categories every tester should learn.

1. Bug Trackers

Part of our role as testers is to share helpful information about the problems we discover during our testing efforts. Sometimes referred to as bugs, faults, defects, issues and more there are dedicated tools to capture information related to problems. They often have templates to help us share relevant information to allow you and others to recreate the problem and retest a fix.?

2. Test Management?

Whether using test scenarios/cases/steps or a session-based exploratory note-taking approach to running tests, test management helps you keep a handle on what you need to test and what you’ve already tested. These tools typically provide some level of quantitative reporting along with planning and scheduling features.?

3. Screen Recorders

A screen recorder allows you to capture a screenshot or video of something you’ve discovered. Sharing this with the right people helps them see and hear what you’ve experienced. These tools can also record your voice so you can describe what it was you were thinking at the time and highlight the specific thing you’ve discovered. Not only useful for highlighting problems but also for prompting questions, sharing ideas and amplifying the good things you discover.?

???Check out the Ministry of Testing Tools Directory. Browse or keyword search to discover new tools.??

4. Data Generators

Test data can make or break your testing efforts. It can waste your time if you have to manually set up your data before every testing session which reduces the likelihood of discovering helpful information. A lack of random test data can also hinder your chances of revealing problems. Data generators create randomised test data rapidly and save you time so you can focus on the important task of revealing helpful information.

5. Developer tools and logs

Looking under the hood is a powerful way to discover problems that might not reveal themselves on the surface? And these problems could threaten the value of the product or service you’re testing. This is where developer tools come in handy. For example, with a web browser, you could look at network information to see what requests are being made to spot anything unexpected. You could also look for errors in the console. Most applications keep a log of activity. Get access to those logs to observe information on the actions you take whilst testing. Log information can help you come up with new test ideas as well as help you spot problems.

Looking for more? Mark Winteringham shares handy advice in his article: What Tools Should I Learn?

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