TaDa Lists (Easy to Use ToDo Lists to make you more productive)

To Do lists

I’ve been using TADA lists for about 3 months now and I love them. They just do exactly what you would expect.

You set up a list and you can move the priorities around depending on how your plans throughout the day change.

I have lists created for

In Test

In Staging

In Planning (soon to be handed to test)

Handed Back to Developement for defect correction.

Let me make clear that this is not meant to replace any defect management system you may have in place. Its far to basic for that.

However if like me your daily priorities are constantly changing and you need to maybe make other team members aware of what things are being worked on in which environments then I have found this as a quick and easy fix.

It can of course be used for many other things like shopping lists. I’ve taken my mobile phone shopping before and when my wife gets home she jumps on the PC and just updates my TADAlist with any items that she needs that I may have missed off.

I then get an email on my mobile phone and bingo I now have an updated list to walk around the shop with. Yes she could ring me but I’d have to write it down. I just find this just easier.

Maybe on that note in the future I should make a post about the perils of using technology just because its there.

Anyway enough of the digressing I hope you find the tool as useful as I and the people I work with have.

Martin H

Bookmarklets for a Web-Tester

Code

In this post I want to give people a nice heads up to some of the tools I use in my daily role.

These are bookmarklets which is just another word for bookmarks which contain javascript.

I use these with firefox although IE and Opera should also fine fine for them also. In Firefox just add them to the bookmark toolbar and you’ll have them at your fingertips.

Zap Cookies! This will clear out any stored cookies for the current page/site

Edit Cookies! This will allow you to edit and stored cookies for the current page/site

View Cookies! This does exactly what it states, it allows you to view and stored cookies for the current page/site

Edit Page

Allows you to edit any page you use this on. All changes are temporary of course and only visible to you.  (will you ever trust a web page screen shot again?). Not yet sure how this fits into the testing arena, however I though I would include it as someone may make decnet use out of it.

Find Redirects! This should list any redirects for the current page, however its currently a tiny bit hit and miss and is does not work 100% of the time, it should however suffice for now and I’ll most likely have to rewrite this at some point in the near future.

remove redirects Lets see what happens if we now remove those redirects we just found using the above Bookmarklet.

Wikipedia lookup This allows you to select any text on a page and once clicked it will lookup that text on Wikipedia

Yahoo site search This allows you to select any text on a page and once clicked it will search on Yahoo for more links from that domain with the same text.

MSN IP Search Firstly I should thank Robert Hansen (RSnake) for this one. Once clicked it will carry out an IP search which can help you detect a wider network for your testing.

numbered list One of my favourites this one. It allows you to make a nice numbered list of all parameters on the page which contain numbers.

show hiddens This and Zap Cookies are my most used Bookmarklets. this one will display all hidden fileds on a webpage and also allow you to edit them.

remove maxlength This will remove all the max lenghts from all input fields (think buffer overflows and code boundry issues)

undisable Who says you can’t click that button . This Bookmarklet will enable any disabled objects on the page.

up This will take you up one directory level in the site structure

top This will take you to the top of the domain.

decrement If your URL ends in a number it will reduce it by one every click

increment As above but the opposite

check images This will check the current page for broken images.

view variables This will list all variable types found on the page. This is more for Developers than testers however its still a useful one to have.

view scripts Like above however it will list all scripts what can be called on the current page.

zap images This should clear all of the images from the page. Works about 98% of the time. This script may need a little tweaking if I ever get the time.

full urls as link text Very useful if you want to see where a link is pointing to.

Enjoy

Martin H

Tags: code, productivity, Testing, tools