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Testing tools are like annoying high-school friends. They take an absurd delight in pointing out the shortcomings in your work, but when the chips are down, they're reliably on your side. Today, these big-mouth, good buddies seem to be swarming into every step of the enterprise development process. Whereas user testing and some UATs were all that were principally used in the past, now there are literally dozens of different types of tests, each of which can indeed provide legitimate and useful information to improve the end product. Unit tests, integration tests, functional tests, UATs, loading tests, security intrusion tests, fuzz testing, exploratory testing, model-based testing, and so on. Add to these, techniques such as static code analysis, and one has to wonder whether testing might be an even larger part of the development cycle than coding.

Either way, though, what is clear is that the advent of numerous testing options has made it possible for rank and file developers to turn out far more reliable code than at any other point in history.

While this is great news for end users, it does confront developers and QA teams with the need to choose the appropriate types of tests for their products and the correct tools to run them accurately. The Jolt Awards provide one of the best ways of seeing the top products in testing. In this article, we include the top spot, the Jolt Award winner, followed by two winners of Productivity Awards. A final page lists the top three runners-up. All products were tested and reviewed by our panel of judges, most of whom have judged in this category before. They include: Andrew Binstock, Larry O'Brien, Gary Pollice, Roland Racko, and Mike Riley. The awards themselves are run by Dr. Dobb's, of course, and sponsored by Rackspace (who let us use their cloud for testing and administrative functions), and Safari On-Line Books (who kindly provide free subscriptions to the judges so as to facilitate access to the latest technical writing on development topics.)

And now the envelopes please...