The top software testing tools you should be using
Technology keeps improving and evolving at exponential rates, and as a result, more and more tools are currently being used every day by testers in order to maintain their company’s quality assurance process. Software testing tools became an essential solution for organizations in order to keep up with their demanding testing cycles timeframes.
We have compiled a list of the top testing tools out there, that can save valuable time and increase your ROI. The frameworks are divided into different categories. So, whether you are looking for an automation solution, an issue tracking software or a load testing tool, you arrived at the right place.
- Issue tracking tools
- Best CI CD Tools
- Best Automation Testing Tools
- Best Mobile App Testing Tools
- Best Accessibility Testing Tools
- Best Load Testing Tools
Issue tracking tools
An issue tracking tool (also known as a bug tracking system or a defect management system) is a software application that keeps track of tasks, bugs and any other type of “tickets” in software development projects.
When “shopping” for a bug tracker tool it is important to regard some crucial features:
- Bug Definition Fields – Bug tracker should have fields that provide information about the bug: status, environment, module, version, priority, severity, screenshots, etc.
- “Assign To” – So you can inform and see who has been assigned with which issues or tasks.
- Reporting and /or Dashboards - containing graphs or charts that present a current snapshot of your bug coverage.
- Storage and retrieval – Beyond the ability to view history and logs of bugs handled (or not), each bug should be assigned a unique ID, in order to enable search for individual issues or tasks.
- Intuitive Worflow - This is important for any testing tool, because you want your team to quickly learn how to use it, and keep using it because they are pleased. Otherwise, you will just find yourself back here looking for a bug tracker again.
Here are some of our top choices for Issue Tracking Tools. The chosen solutions vary in cost and functionality. Each one of them is widely used and has integration options with other testing tools.
ATLASSIAN JIRA
1. Jira
Available both on cloud and server versions, this Atlassian product is thought by many as best in the breed. It allows users to track anything – issues, bugs, user stories, tasks, deadlines, hours – and stay on top of every team’s activity. Jira offers a wide range of integrations with other software testing tools. Atlassian also provides collaboration tools as well as a chat solution and dev tools. They offer a 7 days free trial.
Atlassian also provides collaboration tools as well as a chat solution and dev tools. They offer a 7 days free trial.
Pricing starts at $10/month
www.atlassian.com/software/jira
PIVOTAL TRACKER
2. Pivotal Tracker
Pivotal Tracker is a user-friendly, story-based agile project management tool that allows software development teams to work together and create solutions in real-time. This product offers a 30 days free trial. Tracker is free for public projects, qualified nonprofits, and academic institutions.
Prices for commercial use range from $13-$250 for up to 50 collaborators and can be billed on a monthly/yearly basis.
http://www.pivotaltracker.com/
BUGZILLA
3. Bugzilla
This free product by Mozilla has been around for many years, making it a well-known option for many development projects. It is a Defect Tracking System designed to help you manage your software development process. It is simple and limited, but it does the job it aims to do, allowing individual or groups of developers to effectively keep track of bugs in their product.
REDMINE
4. Redmine
Redmine is an open-source, web-based project management and issue tracking tool. It allows users to manage multiple projects and associated sub-projects. Redmine has calendars and charts for a visual representation of projects and deadlines. Redmine integrates with various version control systems.
MANTIS
5. Mantis
MantisBT is a simple yet powerful open-source bug tracking solution. It has a web application version as well as its own mobile version. In addition, it can be hosted using the MantisHub.
Continuous Integration (CI/CD) tools
Continuous integration, delivery, and development are the practices of merging all developers’ working copies with a shared mainline of their codebase several times a day. This ensures the stability of the code and helps the team to maintain a collaborative product throughout the development process.
If you are looking for a CI/CD testing tool, you need a solution that will make your complicated testing simpler. But you still need to ask yourself some questions in order to make an informed and individual decision.
- Open Source or Proprietary Software – While open-source can be cheaper, and can by nature (with the help of developers) be exactly the solution you need, there are also tangible costs - including setup and maintenance by knowledgeable professionals to consider. Proprietary Software, on the other hand, often comes with built-in support and maintenance, which makes the whole process more pleasant and reliable.
- Software-as-a-Service or Self-hosted – While this decision might not be up to you, and will be influenced by the nature of your organization and management, it is a criterion to be aware of. Self-hosted might give you sense of control and security, but how easy will it be to maintain and update, (and how much will it cost?). with a Saas solution, you need not worry about such matters, however, you should know where your data will be stored, what kind of back they have for when the system fails. And in both cases (hosted or cloud) you should consider how easy or complicated migrating elsewhere might be.
- Integration with Existing Tools – This point should be a core consideration. Unless you are setting something up for the first time, you will want to be sure that the solution you choose integrates with any of your existing testing tools (other automation tools, test management tools, task management, etc.). So, ensure that your CI server integrates properly. test management tools , task management etc.). So ensure that your CI server integrates properly
- Product Features & Extensibility – How many features and functionalities do you really need at present, in the near future, and down the line, and how easily can you “upgrade” or “downgrade”. This can only be answered by you of course, but don’t forget to ask yourself “do I need this”?
While these are some of the main points to consider there are of course more to review such as Pricing, Learning curve, Training & Documentation. Below are some solutions we prefer using and recommend, some offer free trials, some are free, all are good choices.
JENKINS
1. Jenkins
Jenkins is an open-source automation server. Jenkins helps to automate the non-human part of the software development process, with continuous integration (CI) and facilitating technical aspects of continuous delivery (CD). It supports version control tools and sbt based projects as well as arbitrary shell scripts and Windows batch commands.
BAMBOO
2. Bamboo
This Atlassian product is a continuous integration and delivery tool that
ties automated builds, tests, and releases together in a single workflow. It works great alongside JIRA and Stash providing a fully
traceable deployment pipeline.
https://www.atlassian.com/software/bamboo
TEAMCITY
3. TeamCity
TeamCity from JetBrains is a powerful continuous integration framework, that has a free version with 100 build configurations and 3 build agents available. The Enterprise version includes an unlimited number of users and configurations. The main benefits of using the solution are detailed reporting and comprehensive version control.
https://www.jetbrains.com/teamcity/
CIRCLECI
4. CircleCI
CircleCI is a cloud-based CI/CD system supporting GitHub and main programming languages. It provides a complete out of the box framework that needs minimal adjustments. A free plan is available.
TRAVISCI
5. Travis CI
Travis CI is a hosted continuous integration service used for building and testing software projects hosted at GitHub. Travis CI offers a few paid plans for private projects and a free plan for open source.
Best Automation Testing Tools
Functional test automation is the use of a software system in order to control the execution of tests and comparison of actual outcomes with desired outcomes. Test automation can automate some repetitive but necessary tasks in a formalized testing process already in place, or add additional testing that would be difficult to perform manually.
Some features to weigh in when comparing functional test automation tools:
- Test development platform
- Scripting languages
- Programming skills – some boast “no programming skills needed” others are very script based and require some or a lot of programming knowledge.
- Learning curves – how much effort, time and money will it take to get things “up and running”?
- Script creation time – Fast or slow?
- Object storage and maintenance
- Image-based testing
- Continuous integrations possibilities.
- Support
- Price and licensing
SELENIUM
1. Selenium
This free and open-source set of tools allow users to automate
web applications for testing purposes. Web-based
administration tasks can also be automated, thus allowing
testers to be more efficient at their work.
Katalon Studio
2. Katalon Studio
Katalon Studio is an automation testing solution developed by Katalon LLC.
The software is built on top of the open-source automation frameworks Selenium and Appium with a specialized IDE (Integrated development environment) interface for web, API, mobile and desktop application testing. Katalon is recognized as a March 2019 Gartner Peer Insights Customers’ Choice for Software Test Automation.
UNIFIED FUNCTIONAL TESTING
3. Unified Functional Testing (UFT)
This HP product, (originally designed by Mercury Interactive) and formerly known as QTP, helps testers automate tests in order to identify errors, defects, and gaps from desired results of the tested application. A 30 days free trial is available.
https://software.microfocus.com/en-us/products/unified-functional-automated-testing/overview
Soap UI
4. Soap UI
SoapUI is an open-source web service testing application for service-oriented architectures (SOA) and representational state transfers (REST). Its functionality covers web service inspection, invoking, development, simulation and mocking, functional testing, load, and compliance testing.
EGGPLANT FUNCTIONAL
5. Eggplant
This TestPlant product allows users to easily automate their testing, especially in the field of GUI testing. This solution offers advanced technology allowing the UI testing through advanced image search, image recognition, and text recognition. A free trial plan is available and pricing is provided per request.
https://www.eggplantsoftware.com/eggplant-functional-downloads
Best Mobile App Testing Tools
As applications get complex, mobile app testing tools enables application makers to check for functionality, usability, consistency, and security. A huge number of mobile testing tools have been developed in recent years in order to keep up with rapid mobile development: more devices, platforms, and versions means more chances for things to go wrong if overlooked.
Here are some of the points to consider when trying to choose the best solution for your needs:
- Supported Platforms – Understand how an application’s code base will perform across multiple operating systems and interfaces.
- Source Code Requirements and Build Security – Make sure you can only share what you want with who you want.
- Result and Error Logging – You must be able to keep track of your efforts and changes.
- Continuous Testing – with rapid changes, it is critical to recognize how new code changes have impacted the existing system.
- Integration capabilities with 3rd party tools – Handling tracking and reporting with a Test management Issue management solution will have a great impact on the outcome of your app’s release
- Team Management capabilities – Keep track of your team’s work, successes and fails.
Calabash
1. Calabash
Calabash is a test automation framework that doesn’t require coding skills. It provides an easy solution for creating and executing automated acceptance tests for Android and iOS apps.
RANOREX Studio
2. Ranorax
Ranorex is an easy-to-use automation testing tool with ability to record testing performed on mobile devices. The tool doesn’t require development skills in order to create, launch and record tests and see their results. The prices start at 690 EUR for runtime license and premium licenses are available at a higher price.
APPIUM
3. Appium
Appium is an open source mobile test automation framework which is one of the most popular mobile testing tools on the market. It is a cross-platform tool allowing users to write tests against multiple platforms while using the same REST API.
KOBITON
4. Kobiton
Kobiton is a mobile device cloud platform that allows to write and execute manual and automated tests on real mobile devices. The testing activity is documented in automatically generated logs, hence users can capture all actions performed during the testing process. Free plan available and a paying one starts at $10 per 100 prepaid minutes.
Best Accessibility Testing Tools
This family of tools is mostly free, allowing users to test their site’s compliance with web accessibility rules such as ‘Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI). Web accessibility evaluation tools influence different audiences in your organization: designers, developers, non-technical content authors, quality assurance testers, and sometimes also end-users. Each organization, project, and team has differing needs for different accessibility tools features.
When evaluating an accessibility tool pay attention to the following and compare these points to your requirements:
- Guideline Compatibility – Different organizations and governments may require conformance with different accessibility standards, thus different tools support these standards.
- Languages Support
- Type of Tool – is it a plugin, can run as an add-on on your browser, or a designated online service.
- Supported Formats – Most tools check the accessibility of HTML content. Some check other web technologies, such as CSS, SVG, and PDF.
- Reporting capabilities, scope, and format
Wave
1. Wave
This tool checks your website and provides detailed information about your site errors, alerts, features, contrast errors and their exact location.
Tota11y
2. Totta11y
In order to test for accessibility, developers often must have prior accessibility knowledge in order to make sense of the results. Tota11y aims to reduce this barrier by helping visualize accessibility violations (and successes) while educating on best practices.
https://github.com/Khan/tota11y
Sortsite
3. SortSite
SortSite is a web crawler that scans websites for accessibility, browser compatibility, broken links, legal compliance, search optimization, usability and web standards compliance quality issues.
https://www.powermapper.com/products/sortsite/
Best Load Testing Tools
JMeter
1. Jmeter
JMeter is an open-source software used for executing performance testing, load testing and functional testing of web applications. JMeter simulates a heavy load on a server by creating tons of virtual concurrent users to the webserver.
LoadNinja
2. LoadNinja
LoadNinja is a cloud-based load and performance testing tool for web applications. With LoadNinja QA teams are able to check if their web servers can sustain a heavy load of users and if the servers are robust and scalable.
NeoLoad
3. NeoLoad
NeoLoad is an automated performance testing framework for organizations that are continuously testing from APIs to applications. It provides testers and developers automatic test design and maintenance, the most realistic simulation of user behavior, fast root cause analysis and built-in integrations with the entire software development lifecycle toolchain.
https://www.neotys.com/neoload/overview
Need some additional help evaluating which test management tool is the best fit for you? Use this dynamic features checklist to help you make a wise decision.