The Testing Tools Landscape: 2010

Gone are the days when application development and delivery teams could cavalierly ask the business to pick two: cost, time, or quality. The business wants and needs all three. Delivery teams have responded by experimenting with or adopting Agile development practices, choosing fit-to-purpose development platforms, and designing application architectures for faster change. Now it is time for quality management and testing to respond to this faster-moving environment. Functional testing tools are not enough. Quality must move beyond the purview of just the testing organization and must become an integrated part of the entire software development life cycle (SDLC) to reduce schedule-killing rework, improve user satisfaction, and reduce the risks of untested nonfunctional requirements such as security and performance. To achieve this balance of cost, time, and quality, application development organizations must spread a focus on good testing practices across every role. These new requirements have motivated vendors to provide tools that support every role, considerably broadening the testing tools landscape.