I have been researching sources of test tools that are inexpensive or free. In some cases, you get what you pay for. However, it is possible to automate some or a lot of your testing using these tools. The good news is that the investment at risk is low. If you know of any other tools that belong on this page, please contact me.

I have not included prices, since they change often. Please visit the web sites to get more information on these tools.

30 free and cheap test tools mentioned in my StarEast 2011 Tutorial:

 http://randallrice.blogspot.com/2011/05/stareast-2011-free-and-cheap-test-tools.html

Test Design

CTE-XL - Based on the Classification Tree approach. Free and Pro versions - http://www.berner-mattner.com/en/berner-mattner-home/products/cte-xl/

ACTS - Combinatorial test design - Free - http://csrc.nist.gov/groups/SNS/acts/documents/comparison-report.html

AllPairs – www.satisfice.com

PICT – http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/testing/bb980925

More pairwise tools at www.pairwise.org

FreeMind - Mind mapping for test design -  Free - http://freemind.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

METS - Minimal Essential Test Strategy (METS) - Free - These are Excel spreadsheets but help in planning and estimating tests. There is also an iPhone app in the iTunes store. www.gregpaskal.com

Shapes (Mac) - $4.99 - www.shapesapp.com

yEd Graph Editor - Free - http://www.yworks.com/en/products_yed_about.html

GraphWalker - http://graphwalker.org/

Test Management

These tools help you plan and organize testing.

Bromine - http://bromine.seleniumhq.org/ Part of the Selenium suite of tools. Web-based QA tool for Selenium, that enables you to easily run Selenium-RC tests and view the results.

QA Book - Windows-based - Free - Allows you to create, edit and manage requirements, test cases, defects, environments, project success criteria, reporting, automated testing and more. http://www.freetestmanagementtool.com

QA Traq - www.testmanagement.com  (Free) Provides a central location for all test documentation with full revision control.

Testopia is a test case management extension for Bugzilla. http://sourceforge.net/projects/testopia

qaManager - http://sourceforge.net/projects/qamanager

TestLink - Web-based Test Management system. http://www.teamst.org

TestMaster - A test case logging, reporting and test automation tool, much like the commercial product Test Director. http://testmaster.sourceforge.net/

Zeta Test is an integrated test management environment that enables you to perform black-box tests, white-box tests, regression tests or change management tests of software applications. www.zeta-test.com

XStudio is a fully-graphical application developed in Java (so theoretically deployable on any OS). Free at http://www.xqual.com

Open2Test - The Open Source Test Automation Framework is composed of a standard set of keywords that doesn't change, no matter what automation tool you use to automate testing. - http://www.open2test.org

STAF - an open source, multi-platform, multi-language framework designed around the idea of reusable components, called services (such as process invocation, resource management, logging, and monitoring). http://staf.sourceforge.net/

Apodora - A framework/tool for automating functional testing of web applications. It provides the user with programmatic control of the web browser allowing them to interact directly with the browser's user interface. It uses a database backend in order to remember how to find your html elements. This also makes your scripts easier to maintain. http://www.apodora.org/

AutoIT - http://www.autoitscript.com/autoit3/index.shtml

Bad Boy - Free for individuals and deployments of 5 computers or less & not-for-profits. $45/user license fee otherwise. http://www.badboy.com.au/

Cubic Test - Graphical Eclipse plug-in for writing Selenium and Watir tests. It makes web tests faster and easier to write, and provides abstractions to make tests more robust and reusable. http://www.cubictest.org/

Cucumber - Cucumber lets software development teams describe how software should behave in plain text. The text is written in a business-readable domain-specific language and serves as documentation, automated tests and development-aid - all rolled into one format. Works with Ruby, Java, .NET, Flex or web applications written in any language. It has been translated to over 40 spoken languages. http://cukes.info/

Expect - http://expect.nist.gov/

"Expect is a tool for automating interactive applications such as telnet, ftp, passwd, fsck, rlogin, tip, etc. Expect really makes this stuff trivial. Expect is also useful for testing these same applications. And by adding Tk, you can also wrap interactive applications in X11 GUIs.

Expect can make easy all sorts of tasks that are prohibitively difficult with anything else. You will find that Expect is an absolutely invaluable tool - using it, you will be able to automate tasks that you've never even thought of before - and you'll be able to do this automation quickly and easily."

Fake (Mac) $29 - www.fakeapp.com

FitNesse - http://fitnesse.org

Frankenstein – http://frankenstein.openqa.org/

Grease Monkey - http://testertools.com/browsers-based-tools/grease-monkey-web-testing-tool-with-scripts/

IcuTest - http://www.nxs-7.com/icu/Default.aspx

Selenium -  free - a Firefox add-on that will do simple record-and-playback of interactions with the browser -  http://seleniumhq.org/

Sikuli - http://sikuli.org/

WET - Commercial grade Opensource Web automation testing tool - http://wet.openqa.org