A Survey on Open Source Software Testing Tools: A Preliminary Study in 2011

Software Testing is a costly and time consuming process in software development. Therefore, software testing tools are often deployed to automate the process in order to reduce cost and improve efficiency. However, many of them are proprietary and expensive. Hence, open source software testing tools could be an appealing alternative. In this paper, we survey the current states of open source software testing tools from three aspects, namely, their availability for different programming platforms and types testing activities, maintenance of the tools and license limitations. From the 152 tools surveyed, we found that open source software testing tools not only are widely available for popular programming platforms, but also support a wide range of testing activities. Furthermore, we also found that more than half of the tools surveyed have been actively maintained and updated by the open source communities. Finally, these tools have very few licensing limitations for commercial use, customization and redistribution.