Let me introduce you a tool I really find convenient. As a tester, you like to use heuristics for all kind of data you need to fill. Let’s talk about a simple example, a form where you need to enter your name, your address and a text.

You will test this with empty fields, very long text, SQL injection, Special characters, End-of-Line characters, text where numbers are only required and probably also with several encodings, etc  (See this Test Heuristics Cheat Sheet for more ideas). If you don’t have a UI framework that test this with data, then you need to enter this “manually”, or you can be helped by a tool like “Bug Magnet” available in the Chrome Store.

Then simply with a right click you will be able to add:

• text with different encodings (latin, cyrillic, arab,…) also mixed one using a Lorem ipsum
• very long strings (until 64K)
• usual names, addresses and Cities from different countries
• some valid and unvalid email addresses and URL
• numbers (numerical, exponential,…etc)
• different kind of empty strings with whitespaces, leading spaces, tabulation…
• and also SQL injection, javascript injections…

        

This is the perfect tool for the lazy tester in order to access common boundaries and edge cases for exploratory testing. Of course, this is not an exhaustive list of data and your creativity will probably find other tests. You can easily extend with your own config files (see this json file for example)

Plug-in review

Pros

• Free and Open source (available on github)
• Quick to add and use
• Can be extended with json files
• Available with Firefox and Chrome

Cons

• Not available on some fields, I first need to enter one character then right click again (You know…bugs!)