Top Tools for Testers

I was planning on giving a talk to my test team at Nokia about great tools for web testers, and then the hammer dropped, and won't be able to. I was planning on blogging about them anyway, so my next few posts are from a version of that talk.

Before I do that, I wanted to put them in perspective. This list is by no means comprehensive, and i'm quite sure I missed your favorite tool. If you have cool tools for testers, please let me know in the comments! This list is also a bit targeted at testers of web platforms or web services, although some are applicable across the board.

Finally, all the tools in the world won't help without an intimate understanding of the software you are testing, and the platform it is running on. If you are testing a web site built in ASP.NET running on .NET 3.5 and IIS 7, you should know exactly what it means to be running ASP.NET 3.5 websites on IIS 7 even before you get into the intracies of the web site itself. This principle is the same if you are running Ruby sites on Linux. Make sure you know the gotchas of the platform, or the freebies that developers get from the platform. Understanding that will bring you great insight into a better class of bugs that are the real shipstoppers.