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Nearly no one outside the fraternity of testers truly likes testing tools. They're products that enjoy showing developers what they've done wrong, where they've diverged from the path set forth in the requirements and specs, and how little they've considered the effects of scale. What's to like in that? Perhaps that the tools save of us from even greater embarrassment should the defects that somehow showed up in our code unexplained make it out into the wild.

In addition, to the extent that developers integrate testing cycles further into the development process, these tools become important instruments. They enable developers to go way beyond unit testing as they provide insight into end-to-end functionality and UAT-level workability.

Today, there are many such tools available, with a bumper crop of look-alike products coming to harvest in the mobile space. The Jolt Awards are one of the best ways of seeing which are the best products in the testing genre.

In this article, the top products are chosen — all of which the Jolt Judges examined in depth. The awards include the Jolt Award winner; the two runners-up, who receive Productivity Awards; and finally, the three remaining finalists — for a total of six excellent products. As in many categories, votes are very close, and had any one judge voted differently, some finalists would be Productivity Award winners and vice versa. All products were tested hands-on by our panel of judges, most of whom have judged in this category before. They include: Andrew Binstock, David Mulcihy, Roland Racko, Mike Riley, and Gigi Sayfan.

We thank our sponsors, 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…