Introduction

This chapter provides an overview of the various types of tools that can be used to support software testing activities. We look at what these tools are capable of, and how to select and introduce the ones that are best suited to your particular project.

Test tools¹ are used to support single or multiple software testing activities and a wide range of purposes:

Uses of test tools

• Increase testing efficiency
  Manual test activities, and especially those that have to be repeated regularly or are generally time-consuming, can benefit from the use of appropriate tools—for example, automated static code analysis or automated dynamic testing.
• Increase test quality
  Tool-based test case management helps you to manage large numbers of test cases and retain an overview of your work. Tools help to eliminate duplicate test cases and reveal gaps in the selected test case suites, which helps to keep your testing activities consistent.
• Increase testing reliability
  Automating manual test activities increases overall testing reliability—for example, when comparing the expected vs. actual values of large amounts of data or when repeating identical test sequences.
• Make some tests possible
  The use of tools makes it possible to perform tests that cannot be executed manually. These include performance and load tests, or testing real-time systems.

Tool suites

Some tools support only a single task while others cover multiple tasks. There are also complete tool suites that can be used to manage the entire testing process, from test management through test design to test automation, execution, documentation, and evaluation. Such suites are often marketed as “Application Lifecycle Management” (ALM) tools.

Test framework

“Test framework” is another familiar term in the context of test tools, and is usually used to mean one of the following:

• Reusable and extensible program libraries that are used to build test tools or test environments
• The type of methodology used to automate testing (for example, data-driven or keyword-driven)
• The entire test execution process