I hope that you are going to learn something awesome with this article and have this as one of the learning for your 2013 (this year) journey. This article just doesn’t speak directly about some add-on(s) and just give out the names of them. Well, I need not give them; you can still find it by going to the add-on(s) of Firefox or Chrome with the respective websites. I am going to share my experience as well and also talk about, “How a tester / developer” could use these add-on(s) to test better while improving their productivity. That’s why this is called an article. Else I could have just tweeted the add-on(s) name (Chuckles).
Going back 2 years or 3 years, I used to see following kind of testers,
Case 1: A tester was looking into his watch while he wanted to know the page-load time. I went to him and asked, how long do you need to do this? He said, for the same web-page I need to try 100 iterations with several settings like with cache and without cache and on different bandwidths.
Case 2: A tester reporting a bug: I see a text in red color while it had to be in purple. Unfortunately, there were 2 shades of red color and developer thought that tester was talking about the red colored text which was in the bottom of the paragraph rather than between of the paragraph. As they were shades, developer perceived those in his own way.
Looking at the above two examples, it looks very sloppy (At least to me).
Let us speak about, how did I deal with such problems now?
Considering Case 1, for the tester who was checking the load time for the web page, I went to him and said; How about cutting down the effort of you looking into your watch every-time you want to know the load time? He said, please tell me. I introduced him to an add-on of Mozilla Firefox called “Extended status bar” which can help him to get rid of what he is currently doing. He can just refresh the web-page and wait till it loads that’s all. And then he can look into the statistics bar which will not only talk about load time but, more information. Now, he has got it the cool way.
He thanked me so much and then he said, is it a new tool? Well, I said; you are still in stone-age. Please move on to modern era. It has been there from long time, it is just that you never thought of exploring. You were happy with what you were doing and not wanted to become happiest.
Now, let us consider case 2 where the tester reported a bug by saying red while there were 2 shades of red and developer considered the wrong one and thought he / she fixed something while he / she actually created one more bug. Now, I was consulting the project and wanted to know why such problem occurred. It is because, lack of the knowledge about Hex color codes and knowing that there are different shades among 1 color itself. And other thing is, how to get to know those color codes from the web-page. I went to the tester and introduced him to an add-on called “ColorZilla” which is used along with Mozilla Firefox web browser. With that add-on, he need to just mouse over on the text or image and that will provide the Hex code of that specific text or image area. Now, the tester re-wrote the bug report and instead of saying “Red”, he reported it in Hex value (Say #FFFFFF for White). Now, Developer just searched for this Hex value and changed the Hex value to purple to fix the bug. Now, that’s the smarter way.
I hope that by now you might have got some idea about how these add-on(s) could be of help.
This is sample of my experience! What’s your story? You might want to share it!
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