Friday, January 20, 2012

Chrome Web Store Apps That Assists Software Testing

Hey passionate testers out there, hope you all had a great New Year 2012 celebration. I wish you all have tremendous success follow you in all the steps that you take forward with courage. I pray for all your testing dreams come true in 2012.

Chrome Web Store
In this New Year I have started to explore the Chrome web store and found few interesting Apps that are helping me to enhance my testing skills. Apparently there are other places where you can get Apps, like The Apple store and Android Market. But my search was specific in finding free Apps that assist me for better testing via Chrome web store. Meanwhile Mashable published a statistics on Google Chrome that created a lot more interest in me i.e. Google's Chrome surpassed Mozilla's Firefox as the world's number two browser behind Microsoft's internet explorer globally in November, according StatCounter. Thus I started to drill down to find more apps that I can use while testing in Google Chrome, to an extent where I have been using Mozilla Firefox add-ons. Now it's time to share the Chrome Web Store Apps that assists testing, those are listed below. But before that try figuring out, how to install free Apps if you aren't aware of it from here:

1. Allow Right Click*: It re-enables the possibility to use the context menu on sites that overrides it. This cracks the right click disable feature in most of the live banking website. It can be a security threat for the bankers who think they have tried to limit the scope of hacking by disabling the mouse right click. It can be a real treat for testers who are trying to uncover security vulnerability.

2. What Font*: It helps to find out the fonts used in webpage. Fire bug and Webkit Inspector are easy enough to use for developers. However, for others, this should not be necessary. With this extension, you could inspect web fonts, font family, font size, line height and color code by just hovering on them. It is simple & elegant.

3. iMacros*: Automate your web browsers. Record and play repetitious work. Of course, there are few limitation in this iMacros automation checks like other automation tools. But it fits for minimal purpose.

4. IE Tab*: This App displays IE7, 8, 9 within Chrome. Testing the web-pages within Google Chrome along with different versions of IE is featured in this app.

5. CSS Tester*: This helps to test css on real time website. All you need to do is to type the css style rule in popup window after installing the App, and it gets applied to website in real time.

6. Firebug Lite for Google Chrome*: Firebug lite provides the rich visual representation we are used to see in Firebug when it comes to HTML elements, DOM elements, and Box Model shading. It also provides some cool features like inspecting HTML elements with your mouse and live editing CSS properties.

7. Mail Trap*: Mailtrap is a standardized solution for the problem of e-mail notification testing with those notifications isolation from real users of your app. It allows viewing all of your e-mails on line on the Mailtrap site, then forwarding them to your normal mailbox if needed. Simply putting ‘mailtrap.io’as the default SMTP server in your application’s configuration allows viewing all of the emails your application delivers without spamming your real customers.

*All the App titles are being linked to respective App at the Chrome web store. Apps have little limitation and it may not fit to the purpose at times and maybe otherwise. I suggest you to read through the instructions carefully from Chrome web store and then apply it accordingly to suite your purpose. Happy exploring!

Best Regards,
Shiva Mathivanan