This post is for my QA brethren. At my current job I have been introduced to a great free screen capture tool called Jing which allows you perform screen captures, crop them, annotate them, draw on them, and then upload the image as a jpeg to Screencast where it’s hosted. (Jing also does video too, but I won’t get into that here.)
What’s so great about that you ask? Well, you know how difficult it can be to describe exactly what you’ve seen during testing, especially if your talking about UI elements. “Is it a title bar? A menu bar? A window group? Oh hell, here’s a screenshot.” What’s great about Jing is that you don’t have to fill up your defect repository database with images. If you have a large testing team, all those uploaded screen shots can start taking their toll on drive space, and may even slow down your defect tracking tool. (Bugzilla for instance.)
When using Jing the image is uploaded, and then the URL to the hosted image is placed in your clipboard. You can then simply paste the URL into the description field of your defect. This allows the developer on the receiving end of the defect to just click the link, and see the screenshot you took.
Now the downside to this is that your company might not like screenshots of its intellectual property being stored on an external server. Something that might give your employer a “warm fuzzy” is the fact that ScreenCast takes your company’s ownership of the content you uploaded very seriously and has processes in place to report violations of your company’s copyrights. (The service agreement also states that you retain all ownership rights of the content you upload.)
So if you need a good screen capture tool give Jing a shot.