I’m just going through a notebook to see what I have missed blogging about and came across a list of think I think a web tester should know in order to be as effective as they could be. This list does not include things like ‘how to test’ or ‘how to think’, but is more 2nd or 3rd party related.

  • HTML – This is what your customer is going to be presented with. Their browser just interprets and renders it. If you cannot select view source then you are putting yourself at a disadvantage.
  • Java / VB Script – Most web applications these days make use of JS or VB to do fancy stuff on the page. Being able to read and/or manipulate the code through things like FireBug is a treasure trove of bugs
  • SQL – Very, very few web apps do not use a database these days, and trusting the information presented in the browser is asking for trouble. Take for instance a situation where you update your user profile on some site. You click ‘Save’ and the browser reports that your record was updated. But what could have happened is the database is stubbed out so your test did not actually do what you wanted. The only way you will know that it worked is checking the database.
  • Excel – There are a lot of cool features in Excel that have no relevance to use as testers, but here are a couple that will make your life easier
    • The fill handle
    • Custom lists
    • Graphing
    • Pivot Tables
    • Database Access
    • Built-in functions
  • Unix – Lets face it, at some point you are going to be up for a job which is hosted on a unix machine. Be prepared for it. You do not have to be a sys admin in unix, but you should at least be able to do
    • Navigate the filesystem
    • Manipulate processes
    • Manipulate files
  • HTTP – This is the protocol that is spoken between the server and the browser. It’s also a pretty simple one, so understand how messages are sent back and forth. This lets you sniff the traffic to get even more insight into what is going on in the application
  • XML – The rules of XML are what govern XHTML (and the pending HTML 5 I think). XML is also what is passed around between WS components most times. There are only a handful of rules to learn about how these documents are structured.

Again, this is just a quick list from my experience of what knowledge I employ when testing web application. Too often I’ve seen testers that were scared of this list (especially the unix part of it) but once they get over their initial trepidation they pick it up quickly. The lesson there is to not be scared of technology, even if you do not consider yourself a technical person.