Session Tester

The Session Tester application was developed to be a tool for managing and recording Session-Based Testing. Session Tester has a timer so you can keep your test sessions at the desired length, and it provides an easy way to record session notes. Notes are stored in an XML format in your user directory. Session Tester can generate HTML versions of these reports as well.

Session Tester has been designed to seamlessly fit in to your exploratory testing work, and with reports stored in XML format, you have a universally recognized format that can be transformed into a variety of formats.

We want Session Tester to help you improve as a tester, so that you have tools to help you easily describe your testing work, and while doing that, have a source of test idea generation prompts at your fingertips. It can feel intimidating to enter in descriptions of what you are testing, but what if the tool helps you learn to be a better tester? That's our wish.

Notes are stored in an XML format in a ".sessiontester" folder in your user directory. (On Windows, that would be something like: "C:\Documents and Settings\Jonathan\.sessiontester". Session Tester can generate HTML versions of these reports as well.

Session Tester also has resources to help kick start your thinking. We have included an exploratory testing cheatsheet that was created by Elisabeth Hendrickson. Select Help > Cheat Sheet... from the file menu to load it. Session Tester also has an Idea Priming feature to help you if you get stuck.

If, while testing you feel like you have run out of ideas, click the "Prime Me!" button. A short strategy to help prime your creative thinking will appear. If that phrase doesn't help you, try generating more.