Top Tools - HTTP Tracing

Continuing with my list of the most important tools for any web tester to have in thier arsenal, I turn to a set of tools that give you the low level HTTP information related to your tests.

Let's say you are busy bug bashing on the latest build of your super cool world changing web service, and suddenly there is one portion of the page failing to load. Maybe it's a silverlight or flash control, or a complex javascript image loader, or whatever. Every tester should log that bug. However the really good testers aren't content with just that. They want to know why that portion didn't load. In another post i'll talk about tools you can use on the client to determine that the page is working just fine, for now let's assume that it is. So that means there must be a problem getting the resources from the server.

Maybe you have a special version of your web site formatted for mobile devices, but there is one particular device that isn't getting detected. Again, every tester is going to log that bug, but the really good ones are going to say exactly why it's broken. So how are you going to figure that out?

Enter HTTP Tracing tools. With these tools you'll be able to see exactly what the client is requesting from the server and the data it's sending, as well as the actual response from the server.

A really good tool for http tracing will 

• let you see the raw http request and response, including headers and body
• provide better visual aids for searching complex requests and responses
• allow you to craft your own requests
  

Two great tools out there that meet these needs are Fiddler and Wireshark.

Both of these tools are useful, and you would be well served getting familiar with them. Fiddler is just an HTTP(s) proxy, so it will only show that traffic, while Wireshark is a full network sniffer, so it will show all traffic in gory detail, and you can filter down to just show the HTTP traffic if you want.

I've found that I use Fiddler mostly for the simple reason that I am only interested in the HTTP traffic usually.

Let me know if you have a favorite that's not one of these