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Home Articles Software Test Automation Cheap and Free Software Test Tools
Cheap and Free Software Test Tools Print E-mail
Written by Randall Rice   
Wednesday, 04 March 2009 20:58

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.

Test Planning

These tools help you plan and organize testing.

QA Traq - www.testmanagement.com  (Free)

QAtraq provides a central location for all test documentation with full revision control.

Test Automation

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." 

Macro Recorders and Players

These tools capture keystrokes and even create simple scripts that can be replayed.

Macro Scheduler - http://www.mjtnet.com/

(Macro Scheduler is my favorite because of its full-featured scripting language.)

Mouse and Key Recorder - http://www.kratronic.com/recorder/

iOpus Internet Macros - http://www.iopus.com/iim.htm

Macro Express - http://www.macros.com/

Comparison Tools

ExamDiff and ExamDiff Pro - http://www.prestosoft.com/examdiff/examdiff.htm

Beyond Compare - http://www.scootersoftware.com/

Compare It! - http://www.grigsoft.com/wincmp.htm

Total Commander - http://www.ghisler.com/

WinMerge - http://winmerge.sourceforge.net/

Load and Stress Tools

Web Server Stress Tool - http://www.paessler.com

Open Load - http://sourceforge.net/projects/openload/

VeloMeter - http://www.velometer.com/

Load - www.pushtotest.com

Jmeter - http://jakarta.apache.org/jmeter/

Screen Video Capture

These are great tools to document a test. Screen video is captured and saved in either avi format or wmv format, which is about 1/10 the size of avi files.

Windows Media Encoder - www.microsoft.com  FREE - search on the term "Windows Media Encoder" to find it on the Microsoft site.

Test Drivers for Unit Regression Testing

TestMaker 3.3 - http://www.pushtotest.com

NTest for .NET components - http://sourceforge.net/projects/nunit

Article on using NTest - http://www.c-sharpcorner.com/UploadFile/Globalking/nunit01192006034629AM/nunit.aspx

JTest for Java - http://www.junit.org/index.htm

Linux Test Tools

http://ltp.sourceforge.net/tooltable.php

Interactive Test/Debug

PEBrowse Professional Interactive

PEBrowse Profession Interactive is a very powerful, versatile, and customizable Win32 user mode debugger/disassembler.

PEBrowse Interactive is not a source code debugger, but operates at the Intel x86 instruction level and therefore at the lowest level where your program executes.

The debugger fully supports Microsoft .NET managed processes and seamlessly allows interop or mixed-mode debugging.

It can be set as the startup debugger using the system registry Image File Execution Options key - useful for debugging ASP.NET applications.

Configuration Management

Syncronize It! - http://www.grigsoft.com/winsin.htm

FolderMatch - http://www.foldermatch.com/

Test Data Generation

This is a really cool web script that you can use for free and even download the script for use on your own server.

http://www.generatedata.com

More to Come...

Last Updated on Thursday, 12 March 2009 14:08
 

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