Question

I’ve been assigned the job of testing a small Windows application for the company I work for. I’m a little experienced with testing web applications using the Google Chrome Developer Tools. Apart from that, I don’t know much.

For the moment, I manual test keeping an eye on the Windows Task Manager for memory and CPU usage.

What other basic tools should I be using to do manual (as opposed to unit testing) Windows application testing?

Answer 1

There’re a number of tools that can be handy:

• Debugger: either built-in in the IDE (Visual C++ or whatever) or WinDbg
• Application verifier:
  http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms220948%28v=VS.90%29.aspx
• SysInternals tools:
  http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb545021

Process Explorer from SysInternals is much more useful that the task manager.

Off top of my head, here are a few things that you can do without modifying the code or writing test code:

• see if there’re memory leaks or corruptions (use Application Verifier + WinDbg)
• inject failures (that is, at some point modify a status/error code/pointer/some other variable in the debugger as if a piece of code failed to open a file or allocate memory or do something else) and see if the app gracefully handles that

Play with SysInternals tools.

Also, it may be a good idea to buy this book to familiarize yourself with Windows: http://www.amazon.com/Windows%C2%AE-Internals-Including-Windows-Developer/dp/0735625301/

There’re also a few good ones on debugging Windows applications, like this one: http://www.amazon.com/Advanced-Windows-Debugging-Mario-Hewardt/dp/0321374460/
Among the other things it explains how to automatically collect crash dumps from your applications (using Windows Error Reporting AKA WER) and then inspect them in the debugger. I found that useful.