My Favorite Non Automation Tools

Every once in a while, I'll share some of the tools I use beyond just test automation.  In this post, I'm going to share 5 tools I use on an everyday basis.

Jing by Techsmith

Jing is a very handy tool for capturing screenshots and videos.  I've been using it to capture and annotate screenshots to attach to my bug reports, and occasionally short videos demonstrating bugs I have observed.  Actually, many of the screenshots in this post are taken using Jing.

PostMan Rest Client

Postman is one of my favorite REST clients.  What I love about PostMan is it is a Chrome Extension Web App.  Since I'm usually debugging web apps using Chrome, I like how I can launch a rest client via a new browser tab.  I use it to debug Ajax requests, and switch between the chrome developer tools and Postman to copy over request parameters and run them in Postman.

1Password by Agilebits

There are many password managers out there.  But I've been using 1Password for some time now.  What I like about it is it has plugins for various browsers, they have a service that will warn you to change you password if the corresponding site is known to have been compromised, and you can store your password store to DropBox (and a few other cloud services), which makes it easy to use 1Password between different computers.

ng-Inspector

I'm currently working in an AngularJS shop.  I find it useful to examine the data models behind the scenes when I want to try to troubleshoot a bug in our Web Apps.  What I love about ng-Inspector is it's very lightweight, is easy to get to, and does a good job displaying the data in the $scope of the currently loaded AngularJS Web App.

ConEmu

ConEmu is a good way to organize all your console windows.  Instead of having separate console windows for your cmd console, git shell, PowerShell, developer command prompt for Visual Studio.  ConEmu allows you to unify those under 1 window, and have them in separate tabs to keep your work space neat and organized.  Besides organization, it gives you some shortcuts such as easy launching of new consoles and searching through the text in existing open consoles.