Wednesday, July 9, 2008

Testing Tool

For test engineers, tools are essential for every testing activity. It will be very difficult for any one to perform all the testing activities without help of appropriate tools.

Fortunately, tools are present for every activity related to testing from Test Management, execution to reporting. As a test engineer, you need to know not only core testing tools but also tools which can improve your efficiency multi fold.
TestingGeek has divided tools based on the activity they perform

* Requirement Management

In the recent time, people have started realizing that testing team should be involved in the project from the inception. Early involvement of test team in the project can be very beneficial for the project, but it require test team to be familiar with the tools which are used to manage requirement of the project. Tools like Rational Requisite Pro, Telelogic help people in managing requirements in a better way. You should try to make yourself familiar with these tools. As a tester, if you participate in requirement gathering process or analyze requirement for testability, maintainability, ambiguity etc., having a good understanding of requirement management tools can make your life easier.
o User Stories

* UML or software design tools

More and more people have started realizing the value of UML and software design. Modeling tools gives you functionality of designing your whole system, use cases, sequence diagram etc. As a test engineer you should be familiar with the use cases, class diagram, sequence diagram and how it can be used to increase your understanding of the system. Good understanding of use cases and system design can help you in writing more efficient test cases and help you in finding design flaws as well. Familiarity with tools like Rational Rose, Rational Software Architect can go a long way in doing that.

* Test planning and management tool

Tools mentioned in the above section can be treated as good to have, but these tools are essential. You should try to get expertise in the tools like Rational Test Manager, Mercury Quality Centre etc. These tools can be used for managing test assets, creating test plan and cases, tracking execution, reporting and executing automated test cases as well. Some of the tools covered on TestingGeek are mentioned below.
o Mercury Quality Centre.

* Test execution tools

This is what most of the test engineer use for Test Automation. Most of the tools in this category support the playback kind of functionality. These tools can be used to automate and execute automated test cases. Tools like Rational Functional Tester, Rational Robot, QTP, WinRunner and SilkTest can be used for this purpose.
o SilkTest
o Test Complete
o Rational Functional Tester
o Rational Test Suite
o FitNesse
o Selenium IDE
o Selenium Remote Control


* Unit Testling tool

Though unit testing is mostly done by development team, but now a days test team also assist development team in writing and defining unit test cases.
o JUnit

* Performance testing tool

Performance testing is mostly used for web based applications. But in some case, memory profiling can be used for desktop applications as well. Tools like Load tester, JMeter can create virtual hosts and can simulate the real time load on the system.

* Useful Tools

Apart from the tools mentioned above, there are some more tools which are always good to have for your use. Specially, tools like VMWare, NortonGhost

VMWare - A Tester's Best Friend : In this article, author explains what is virtualization, and how to create and use VMWare in your testing. It explains, in simple steps how to create virtual images, how to create snapshot and how to use it.

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