How are testing tools categorized ?

There is a wide variety of testing tools available to carry out different types of testing. the testing tools can be divided into the following categories :
- Source code Testing Tools
The tools that fall in this category check the source code of the application. the testing is white box testing and so the implementation details are considered. A number of tools are available to check line coverage, branch coverage, and path coverage. Tools are also available to test whether the source code is compliant to the standard coding guidelines and to generate the metrics.
- Functional/Regression Testing Tools
These tools are used to test the application software and web applications such as web sites. Applications involve Graphical User Interface, the tools test the GUI objects and functionality automatically. These tools carry out black box testing.
- Performance Testing Tools :
These tools are used to carry out performance testing or stress testing. These tools are very useful to test how the application works when multiple users access the application simultaneously. These tools simulate multiple users on a single machine and hence you do not need to have many machines and many test engineers can do performance testing. E.g. AutoTester's AutoController, Mercury Interactive's Load Runner, Apache JMeter, belong to this category.
- Java Testing Tools :
A number of tools are available exclusively for testing Java applications. These tools test the applications written in Java programming language and for testing java classes. Jemmy is an open source library to create automated tests for Java GUI applications.