Portable stuff for software testing / quality assurance?

[webfork]

Portable software is SO much better for testing because I have to reimage the machines I work on almost every time. Also, its important the software not interfere with the test. Do any developers or testers on the forums have software they use or encourage their testers to use?

Here's what I've got so far:

* PicPick - for screencaptures
* ArsClip - great when you've got to enter in the same info in programs over and over again on a multi-system test
* SysExport - for pulling info from error messages
* System Information - for getting software version and hardware information
* Notepad++ - always great for opening and ordering config files

What am I missing?

[webfork]

Old thread update:

Some other tools I now use:

• For full video: ShareX
• Screenshots: Either ShareX or Greenshot
• Recording Procedures: Imago (outdated but portable) or Steps to Reproduce (not portable)

Why anything more than screenshots? Sometimes full video is necessary, especially with intermittent problems (developers often treat something they can't reproduce as fake). Procedure recording tools are especially helpful when going through A LOT of steps to get to an error.

[SYSTEM]

Sometimes full video is necessary, especially with intermittent problems (developers often treat something they can't reproduce as fake).

It's not that we assume that people who report unreproducible bugs are trolling. It's much more simple: anything we can't reproduce, we can't fix!

[webfork]

It's not that we assume that people who report unreproducible bugs are trolling. It's much more simple: anything we can't reproduce, we can't fix!

Most bug reports that I've done through open source and freeware projects have been positive (mostly). However, at companies there's an adversarial relationship between QA and developers. This is not a bad thing: when those two groups get along well, it's asking for buggy software.

I've even been in a position where the developers were asking management to dump our entire group. That's when you know you're doing your job.

[SYSTEM]

However, at companies there's an adversarial relationship between QA and developers. This is not a bad thing: when those two groups get along well, it's asking for buggy software.

Then I guess that I have been lucky not to experience that myself. Rovio outsources QA to Testronic Labs, and we got along with them really well.

I used to tell the cause of the bug in the bug report if I found it interesting. They eventually answered that they find the causes interesting as well, and that it provides useful insight on how the game is expected to work, which saves time for everyone when they don't report expected behavior as bugs.

When they did report expected behavior as bugs, I marked the bug reports as invalid instead of "fixing" them in order to "stay in good terms". I find that when the relationship between programmers and QA is healthy, QA is not afraid to report bugs and programmers are not afraid to reject non-bugs. And when I marked a bug report as invalid, I explained the reason in a comment. Every single time.

At best, videos about the games breaking in unexpected ways were fun to watch. There is something attractive in chaos.

And one of my best experiences of working with Testronic was a case in which I broke a cheat feature. We don't use the bug tracking system in such cases because it's there only for player-visible bugs. They sent an email to our internal QA that forwarded it to me. I noticed that they had titled their request as a "Suggestion" and they used, well, interesting language.

Could you please check if it is possible to fix this debug feature to make it more viable for testing?

They seem to position themselves clearly below us programmers. Anyway, I fixed that cheat and apologized for having broken it.

[webfork]

Old thread update:

My current position involves some software testing so programs I've been actively using:

• Textify
• ShareX with one of two features:
  • It's h.265 screen recorder, which produces a very small file size at the cost of quality (also you'll need a more recent video player like VLC to view it).
  • Auto-Capture plus SFK to delete duplicates (basically cut down all screenshots to those that include screen changes) - which produces perfect quality images and I can use for later reference.
• X-Abiword for writing up reports because LibreOffice doesn't handle pasted images as well. EDIT: I've been using ONLYOFFICE for this task lately, although the program isn't portable.
• TBDT - This gives an air of something really official.

[vmars316]

• Textify

How do I use this Textify :
Move its gui over the text I want to capture
then click LeftMouse+Cntrl ?
Or what ?
Thanks

[billon]

no
launch
change scortcut if you want
you can close it (it's not exit, it in the tray now)
point cursor to what you want to copy
press shortcut
copy
did you even visit website?