These tools are based on the testing activities or tasks in a particular phase of the SDLC. Testing activities can be categorized as:

• Reviews and inspections
• Test planning
• Test design and development
• Test execution and evaluation

Tools for Review and Inspections

Since these tools are for static analysis on many items, some tools are designed to work with specifications but there are far too many tools available that work exclusively with code. In category, the following types of tools are required:

Complexity analysis tools: It is important for testers that complexity is analysed so that testing time and resources can be estimated. The complexity analysis tools analyse the areas of complexity and provide indication to testers.

Code comprehension: These tools help in understanding dependencies, tracing program logic, viewing graphical representations of the program, and identifying the dead code. All these tasks enable the inspection team to analyse the code extensively.

Tools for Test Planning

The types of tools required for test planning are:

1. Templates for test plan documentation
2. Test schedule and staffing estimates
3. Complexity analyser

Tools tor Test Design and Development

The following are the types of tools required for test design and development.

Test data generator: It automates the generation of test data based on a user defined format. These tools can populate a database quickly based on a set of rules, whether data is needed for functional testing, data-driven load testing, or performance testing.

Test case generator: It automates the procedure of generating the test cases. However, it works with a requirement management tool which is meant to capture requirements information. Test case generator uses the information provided by the requirement management tool and creates the test cases. The test cases can also be generated with the information provided by the test engineer regarding the previous failures that have been discovered by him/her. This information is entered into this tool and it becomes a knowledge-based tool that uses the knowledge of historical figures to generate test cases.

Test Execution and Evaluation Tools

The types of tools required for test execution and evaluation are:

Capture/Playback tools: These tools record events (including keystrokes, mouse activity, and display output) at the time of running the system and place the information into a script. The tool can then replay the script to test the system.

Coverage analysis tools: These tools automate the process of thoroughly testing the software and provide a quantitative measure of the coverage of the system being tested. These tools are helpful in the following:

• Measuring structural coverage which enables the development and test teams to gain insight into the effectiveness of tests and test suites
• Quantifying the complexity of the design
• Specifying parts of the software which are not being covered
• Measuring the number of integration tests required to qualify the design
• Producing integration tests
• Measuring the number of integration tests that have not been executed
• Measuring multiple levels of test coverage, including branch, condition, decision/condition multiple conditions, and path coverage.

Memory testing tools: These tools verify that an application is properly using its memory resources. They check whether an application is:

• Not releasing memory allocated to it
• Overwriting/ Over-reading array bounds
• Reading and using uninitialized memory

Test management tools: Test management tools try to cover most of the activities in the testing life cycle. These tools may cover planning, analysis, and design. Some test management tools such as Rational's TestStudio are integrated with requirement and configuration management and defect tracking tools, in order to simplify the entire testing life cycle.

Network-testing tools: There are various applications running in the client-server environments. However, these applications pose new complexity to the testing effort and increases potential for errors due to inter-platform connectivity. Therefore, these tools monitor, measure, test, and diagnose performance across an entire network, including the following:

• Cover the performance of the server and the network
• Overall system performance
• Functionality across server, client, and the network

Performance testing tools: There are various systems for which performance testing is a must but this becomes a tedious job in real-time systems. Performance testing tools in measuring the response time and load capabilities of a system.