QA Tools for the Taking

Most of us in the QA community, I think, are aware that there are a lot of decent tools available to us that we don't have to pay for. Some of us may know it in the back of our heads, but just may not think of it when the occasion arises.

Here's a case in point. I'm presently in job search (or career transition, or whatever polite title you wish to give it). Part of this process involves talking with a great many people, networking to find that next opportunity. In the course of an informational interview, I encountered a QA manager of a small shop with a problem: no budget and a need for tools.

In my last position, I went through the same situation, having to begin building a tool set for QA without a budget. After some research, I discovered a wealth of open source tools that I could use without a monetary outlay. Of course, there is a cost: time, equipment, learning the tool, training others -- but compared with the cost of a "professional" tool, these ancillary costs are fairly minimal. Many of the tools you find are quite well built, though they may lack the polish of the programs you pay mega-bucks for. For the price, it's hard to beat them.

The QA manager I spoke with needed something better than spreadsheets and documents to keep his test cases in. I was able to point him to a tool I used with a lot of success at my last position available on SourceForge.net. Called RTH (Requirements and Testing Hub), it's similar in layout to TestDirector, giving you the capability to store requirements, test cases, test suites for specific releases, and the added bonus of a defect tracker built in. There are similar tools with different features: if you need it, you can find it, or at least come close!