A Critical Analysis of Software Testing Tools

Abstract

Software testing is a crucial part of software development, it ensures that the software been developed performs all functional requirements and is free from any form of defect and errors. This ensures that the software is of good quality and standard. While testing a software, it is important to be time and cost consciousness. This reason has made most testers switch from the manual testing process to automation of software testing, to reduce time and cost. But then selecting a software testing tool for automated testing that best fit a project is important yet challenging task, the objective of this paper is to evaluate some of the most used software testing tool, identify their strength and weakness and also the field where they can be employed, either for mobile testing, web service testing or both. The method utilized in the paper involved the analysis of recommended literatures to pinpoint necessary testing tools selected based on inclusion and exclusion criteria, that were evaluated. The result of the analysis indicted that based on the selected criteria, testing tools that supports web platform testing made up 17%, while tools that supported desktop and mobile platforms was 10% and 7% respectively. also, 7% of the tools examined were found to be open source tools while 12% were licensed tools. 10% of the testing tools examined supported the test result and report generation criterion while tools that require the knowledge of programming language was least as only 3% of examined tools supported this criterion. It was observed that there is no one perfect tool for testing, but for a particular testing purpose, tradeoffs can be made to select the best tool depending on the size of the project, the budgeted cost for testing, the platform of the application and also the language that is used to develop the project.