The list of 6 applications that any tech company must have
This is my own list but you can find it fit anyone.
Let’s dive into
The need for a list in a hi-tech company
I am doing QA (Quality Assurance) for the last 13 years.
QA job by definition is to make sure the tested features/components/products are working by design and are bugs free.
As a QA tester, I need some applications to make my life easier.
For example- if he wants to reproduce and report a bug he may need to do some screenshots or a video of the screen.
He might need to debug code or an error with an advanced text editor.
And what about running many environments and keeping snapshots of those environments?
Over here you can find a list of 6 applications that any tech company must have.
These applications are used by me on my desktop at work.
I think any QA tester can benefit from it and even people not doing QA can find one software or two suitable for their needs.
The list is of 6 applications, the order is unimportant and most of them are Free:
List of 6 applications that any tech company must have
Bug shooting– Screen Capture software.
When one report a bug sometimes he needs to attach a screenshot of the screen showing the bug.
If you have bug shooting– one click on the ‘print screen’ button and you get the screen.
If you have more than one connected monitor- you get both screens.
So, you are able to:
- Add graphics and text
- Flip screen
- Zooming
- Undo
- Save to a few formats
- Mark in a red square part of the screenshot
- Crop the desired part of the screen
Wink– Creating movies of your screen.
Sometimes you need to show the entire reproduction from start to end.
You need a movie like that will record your steps until the end.
Using wink is easy, light weight (good quality) and Free.
The software creates your movie as many screen captures, each screen can be modified to your needs.
You may add:
- Text
- Shapes
- Jumping inside the movie
- Add delay
- <next> <previous> buttons
- Goto URL buttons and many more.
Notepad++– Advanced editor
Notepad++ is an advanced text editor
Easy to use, clear to understand, Free, holds many features inside:
The software Knows to read almost any text format known to mankind.
Also, You can open many files in parallel.
It is easy to debug.
It has advanced find / replace on every opened file.
The software supports almost the entire encodings.
Also, it supports most of the programming languages.
And lastly, able to open xls,csv files with many rows more than excel itself.
VMware– Virtual machines
Imagine many machines running on one machine only.
The most important software for a QA and I believe to anyone in the computers industry and it is Free.
So what you can do here?
You take one physical machine.
Install Windows or Linux and above install VMware software and that’s it.
You can run in parallel many instances of windows or Linux on this one physical machine, each with his own IP and own devices (Hard Disk, CD, Network interface, CPU, etc…).
Think about the money this software save to any company:
- Instead of buying many machines of Windows and Linux.
- Instead of holding servers like Exchange and others.
- What about paying power bills to these machines not to mention salaries to employees.
You just buy one machine and have it all!
What about testing android without even holding a real mobile machine but by running it on one of your instances.
It also let you save snapshot of the machine at one time and be able to revert to that same moment.
Acronis– Backup & Recovery utility.
It is important for QA to install a fresh build from scratch and not over an already installed build which contains many bugs in order to avoid biased issues.
There is a need for software that will insure the machine is like scratched installation.
When you would like to keep the machine at a position- restart your computer while Acronis CD inside to backup the entire machine.
From this point you are allowed to install what ever you need and always you can go back to the moment of creating the image.
Just run Acronis recover utility to revert the machine to the backup point.
Another use is to backup the machine contains a major release of the tested software and test upgrade with each new build.
A feature inside is to backup incrementally, which means that once you would like to store a better image- recover the current one, upgrade, and back up again.
The backups can be implemented with different compressions and size types.
You can backup entire partitions, part of them, specific folder or files.
mRemote– Many screens in one screen.
Probably the less known software from my list over here, yet the most efficient one and for Free.
Sometimes while working we need to have many windows open.
For example, one window is doing RDP, second window is doing SSH while third window is doing HTTP Browsing and another one opened on our ESX machine, etc..
mRemote will do all using multi tab manager. It supports:
- RDP
- VNC
- ICA
- SSH
- Telnet
- RAW
- Rlogin
- HTTP/S protocols
- Any external application you define.
End of list
That was the list.
Although it is talking about 6 applications that any tech company must have
But each one and on each year anyone can add / delete / update to that list.
What are yours must have applications?
Thank you for sharing the information.
Very useful !
Efrat