What are different conditions in which you can select a testing tool?

The requirement of a testing tool can be judged if you analyze the existing scenario in your organization.
- Are your customers happy with the software delivered by you. If they are unhappy and report about the bugs that they have faced, then the testing process needs to be improved. Now, the organization needs to consider an option of using a testing tool.
- If the customers are happy with the product delivered, then find out the effort, time and money spent on the testing phase. The productivity of people can be increased by using these tools.
- If the manpower attrition rate is very high, then the most likely reason is that they were getting bored doing repetitive things. Testing tools remove the manual work and hence the test engineers enjoy their work.
- If performance testing has to be done on your software, tools come in handy.
- If the organization believes in a process-oriented approach to testing, testing tools will be of immense use.
- If project teams are located at different locations, a web based management tool will be very effective for efficient management of testing process.
Once the decision of using a testing tool is made, you need to make a choice of which testing tool should be used based on:

- Most of the application software packages need to be tested for functionality. As software is modified, regression testing is also a must. Hence,functional/regression testing tools are must.
- Load testing is preferred if the software is C/S application or a web application. A performance testing tool is also used.
- Testing management tools can be integrated with the above tools also.
- Once the type of testing tools required are decided, obtain the tool for the environment in which the software runs.
- Testing tool vendors also give tools that support testing for software packages such as Siebel, SAP etc.
- To test the source code, you need to but source code testing tools.
- Bug tracking tolls need to be used for tracking bugs in large software development project.
- Testing management tools are a must if the organization is keen on implementing process-oriented testing.
- Web enabled testing tool is of great use if the project teams are at different places.