Software Testing Tools Checklist: Do your tools empower your developers?

Developers need software testing tools that are accurate and easy to integrate. Evaluate your tools with this 7-step Software Testing Tools Checklist.

October is Cybersecurity Awareness Month, with the theme “Own IT. Secure IT. Protect IT.” All month we’ll be publishing articles to help you integrate security into your organization and your development processes.

Finding and resolving security issues as early as possible in the software development life cycle (SDLC) saves your organization both time and money. But the only way to shift left and find issues earlier is to empower your developers with both security and quality testing.

The first step in improving your application security posture is finding the right software testing tools for your developers. Your tools should align with your firm’s needs and goals, boost developer productivity, and keep costly issues out of your code.

Software Testing Tools Checklist

These seven questions will help you choose the best software testing tools for your organization:

1. Can our developers test code throughout all stages of development?

• Yes. Our developers can test for and resolve bugs during code development, when code is compiled, before it hits production, and after it goes live.
• No. Our development teams can test during only a few stages of the SDLC.

2. Do our software testing tools integrate natively into our development toolchain?

• Yes. Our tools can be integrated into our build/CI systems, IDE, source repository, and bug tracking system so developers can see results and resolve issues rapidly.
• No. Our tools sit outside our development toolchain.

3. Do we have a comprehensive testing approach?

• Yes. Our tests cover web, mobile, and embedded software, including source code, third-party code, open source code, and binaries. Results provide full path coverage, ensuring every line of code and potential execution path is tested.
• No. Our tests assess only certain types of code or software applications or don’t consider underlying frameworks.

4. Do our developers trust the test results?

• Yes. Our results have high fidelity and identify critical issues without overwhelming developers with false positives and false negatives.
• No. Too much “noise” causes our developers to waste time or ignore results altogether.

5. Do our developers receive testing results quickly?

• Yes. We find most errors in real time during coding. We save time by automating tests requiring business logic testing, identifying every error instance across shared code.
• No. Our developers must slow or stop their process while they wait for testing results.

6. Are the results easy for developers to understand and prioritize?

• Yes. Software testing results show the location of errors in the code, rank issues by criticality, and provide remediation guidance and sample code. Our developers can use the results to improve their coding skills.
• No. Results are difficult to interpret, so our developers avoid using the tool or may not implement changes.

7. Do our software testing tools track improvements well?

• Yes. Our tools provide statistics on testing results over time, across scans, and across our application portfolio. We can share these results easily with our executive team and use them to incentivize developers to continually improve.
• No. Reports don’t track improvements or are difficult to explain to our executive team.

With this checklist in hand, your quality, security, and development teams can align on requirements. You’ll be more likely to choose software testing tools that address everyone’s goals and that developers will adopt.

This post was originally published Dec. 7, 2017, and refreshed Oct. 3, 2019.