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The Best Quality Engineering Tools Shortlist

The focus on prevention over patches has given rise to an abundance of tools that facilitate quality engineering, ranging from collaboration and productivity tools to DevOps solutions, testing software, analytics tools, security solutions, and many more.

Here’s a shortlist of the best software to help with your quality engineering process:

  1. 1. New Relic — Best for AI insights using natural language via a chat interface
  2. 2. Appsurify TestBrain — Best for faster test feedback
  3. 3. Sympli — Best tool for collaboration between designers and developers
  4. 4. Apexon — Best for implementing test automation within your workflow
  5. 5. CucumberStudio — Best collaboration tool for behavior-driven development
  6. 6. Katalium — Best open-source testing automation tool
  7. 7. Perforce Suite — Best software quality assurance suite for devops
  8. 8. LinearB — Best software quality engineering tool for managing team health
  9. 9. Inflectra Suite — Best holistic application testing product ecosystem
  10. 10. SeaLights — Best enterprise quality governance and software risk scoring

Software quality is a vitally important consideration for anyone in the business of developing apps, regardless of whether they’re geared towards consumers or businesses. 

In the US alone, the cost of poor software quality in 2020 was approximately $2.08 trillion, according to The Cost of Poor Software Quality In the US: A 2020 Report, published by Synopsys, in collaboration with the Consortium for Information & Software Quality (CISQ).

User expectations are higher than ever before, and this means that the more competitive your niche is, the more important it is that your software delivers on its promises. This is why it’s crucial to stay abreast of evolving quality methodologies such as quality engineering and make sure you’re using the best available tools for the job.

In this post, I’ll cover what quality engineering is, the difference between quality engineering (QE) and quality assurance (QA), and explore 10 top tools for quality engineering. 

For each tool, I’ll provide an overview, describe its use case, and provide pricing and free trial information. I’ll also break down some of the main types of quality engineering tools and provide some examples in each category.

What Is Quality Engineering (QE)? 

Quality engineering is a relatively new approach to promoting quality in software development in general and product development in particular. 

With the high cost of low-quality software, many companies are starting to take a more proactive and preventative approach to quality management throughout the entire development process (from idea to launch and beyond) rather than trying to fix bad quality software after it’s been shipped.

This more holistic approach aims to be more resource-efficient, saving software developers’ time and money while ideally resulting in shorter deployment cycles.

Quality engineering includes analyzing and evaluating the processes involved in the development of software in order to continuously improve quality and efficiency, and reduce waste. This commitment to quality extends beyond the product’s launch, feeding insights gained throughout the entire product development lifecycle into updates and future products. 

For more detailed information about quality engineering, read our blog, What Is Quality Engineering? 

What’s the Difference Between QA and QE?

The main difference between quality assurance and quality engineering is that QA takes a corrective approach to quality control, whereas QE takes a preventative approach by applying rigorous quality checks throughout each phase of the software development lifecycle.

The problem with the traditional quality assurance model is that finding and addressing quality issues after the fact is inefficient. This is because it often requires that aspects of the product be redone, leading to delayed launches and higher costs (and, frequently, hasty fixes that don’t always address the quality issues).

For a more detailed analysis of the difference between quality engineering and quality assurance, read our blog on the topic: Quality Engineering Vs. Quality Assurance: Everything You Need To Know.

Overviews Of The 10 Best Quality Engineering Software

Here’s a brief description of each of the quality control tools to showcase each tool’s best use case, some noteworthy features, and screenshots to give a snapshot of the interface.  

1

New Relic

Best for AI insights using natural language via a chat interface

This is an aggregated rating for this tool including ratings from Crozdesk users and ratings from other sites.
4.3
411 reviews

Free version available

From $49/user/month

New Relic is a performance monitoring system for data for engineers to monitor, debug, and improve their entire stack. It's designed to help you keep an eye on your software's health and performance with a variety of flexible reports and dashboards. It's incredibly useful for getting a clear, detailed picture of how your software is performing. It's not just about spotting problems—although it's great at that—it's also about understanding trends, identifying potential issues before they become big problems, and generally keeping everything running smoothly.

The APM (Application Performance Monitoring) feature is a feature worth noting. It gives you real-time insights into your software's performance, so you can spot and fix issues quickly. Then there's the Infrastructure Monitoring feature, which lets you keep an eye on your entire infrastructure, from servers to cloud services. And the Browser Monitoring feature is great for understanding how your software is performing from the user's perspective. They also have a generative AI assistant, New Relic Grok, which can inject conversational questions like 'What caused this CPU spike?' and answer them via a chat interface.

Integrations include over 600 apps that include cloud platforms like AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure, CI/CD tools like Jenkins, CircleCI, and Travis CI, communication tools like Slack and PagerDuty, and other monitoring and analytics tools like Grafana, Datadog, and Splunk. It also has an API you can use to build custom integrations.

New Relic has a free version available. Their paid plans start at $49/user/month and offer additional features, like SAML single sign-on, 24x7 support availability, 2-hour critical initial support response SLA, and additional data ingest per month. 

2

Appsurify TestBrain

Best for faster test feedback

This is an aggregated rating for this tool including ratings from Crozdesk users and ratings from other sites.
5
2 reviews

60-day free trial

$59/seat/month

Appsurify’s TestBrain is a risk-based testing solution that delivers test results on a per-change basis. It's one of the best quality engineering software tools in the market for experienced testing teams who want to build more efficiencies into their test automation practice, providing features that help QA teams streamline their software testing environment, reduce CI pipeline build times, achieve Shift Left testing, and reduce overall costs.

Appsurify has two main subscription plans available: Plus and Professional. Appsurify Plus is tailored for small businesses and startups, and it starts at $59 per seat/month with a 60-day free trial. The Professional plan best suits the QA automation testing requirements of midsize teams and large enterprises. SaaS and on-premise license options are available, but the latter is only bundled with the Professional plan.

Both subscription packages come with a variety of features such as smart test selection and execution, auto-mapping of tests to code, advanced reporting, advanced analytics, risk alerts, and flaky failure prevention. Both plans support various test types, including UI, E2E, integration, unit, API tests, and more. The features exclusive to the Professional package are prioritized manual testing, full onboarding, and priority support, although standard support and initial setup onboarding are included in the Plus package too.

3

Sympli

Best tool for collaboration between designers and developers

Free Trial

$22.5/month

Sympli is full-featured version control and handoff tool that makes it easier for designers, product managers, and engineers to collaborate, creating better alignment between the user interface design and the back-end functionality, right from the start.

With Sympli, stakeholders can give inline feedback on shared projects regardless of whether the designs were created in Sketch, Figma, Adobe XD, or Photoshop. Sympli also integrates with Jira and Slack, streamlining developer handoffs and workflows.

Sympli’s pricing starts at $22.5 per month, which includes 5 “seats” or users. Sympli also offers a free trial.

4

Apexon

Best for implementing test automation within your workflow

Customized pricing upon request

Apexon is a quality engineering service that aims to help you and your team prepare for new requirements and expectations resulting from digital advancement. Apexon strives to equip you with tools and methodologies to help you navigate the transformation within digital strategies.Apexon provides an abundance of features such as test automation services, which allow you to create and run your own tests. The tool has framework implementation and automated regression testing as a part of their end to end test automation services so you can easily integrate their services within your workflow. Apexon also offers data engineering and service visualization, providing you every opportunity to ensure your application lifecycle is fully covered.Apexon provides customized pricing upon request.

5

CucumberStudio

Best collaboration tool for behavior-driven development

14 Days Free Trial

$33.65/per user per month (€29/u/m)

CucumberStudio helps teams to arrive at a clear shared understanding of precisely what the product should do and co-design effective acceptance tests. CucumberStudio also allows teams to accelerate test cycles through test automation.

Thanks to its seamless Git integration, CucumberStudio serves as a single source of truth by automatically ensuring documentation is up to date, accessible, and easy to understand even for non-technical members of cross-functional teams.

CucumberStudio pricing starts from ~$33.65/per user per month (€29/u/m). CucumberStudio offers a 14-day free trial and a free open source version, CucumberOpen, is also available.

6

Katalium

Best open-source testing automation tool

Katalium is a test automation framework that makes it easier to automate software testing using TestNG, Selenium, and other popular open-source test automation frameworks within Visual Studio Code.

To put it simply, Katalium gives software testers a blueprint for test automation projects, minimizing the learning curve to enable teams to ship higher quality products in less time.

Katalium is an open-source project by Katalon, which offers a robust suite of enterprise software testing automation and TestOps tools.

Katalium is open source and available free of charge.

7

Perforce Suite

Best software quality assurance suite for devops

Free Trial

Perforce’s suite of software development tools for enterprise teams includes a variety of solutions for planning, developing, and creating; testing and validating; and operating, managing, and scaling software.

Perforce has a range of DevOps solutions that address quality, compliance, security, speed, and collaboration throughout the entire product lifecycle from ideation to launch. This makes it an excellent choice for enterprise quality engineering.

Each Perforce tool has its own pricing model, available on request. A free trial is available.

8

LinearB

Best software quality engineering tool for managing team health

“free forever” trial for up to 8 devs (with 45 days of data retention).

$15/dev/month

LinearB is a project board specifically designed for dev leads, providing detailed project updates in a single screen. This helps dev leads to track project progress, identify risks such as bottlenecks and high-risk code, and offer assistance where it’s needed most.

LinearB uses team-based metrics (not individual metrics) to help dev leads track quality and efficiency trends and distribute work evenly to prevent team overload or burnout.

LinearB pricing starts from $15 per dev per month and they offer a “free forever” trial for up to 8 devs (with 45 days of data retention).

9

Inflectra Suite

Best holistic application testing product ecosystem

Free Trial

The Inflectra suite is a whole application management and testing product ecosystem, with tools geared towards product managers, developers, and testers to promote quality engineering throughout the software development lifecycle.

Inflectra gives product managers a bird’s eye view of projects, enabling them to track project burndown, review test coverage, and allocate resources where it’s most needed.

For developers, it’s a great tool to centralize everything because it supports effortless IDE integration, source code management, bug and user story tracking, CI management, and automation.

For software testers, Inflectra’s tools facilitate manual testing, testing automation, exploratory testing, and team management.

Inflectra’s pricing varies by tool or bundle and the number of monthly users. Users receive a discount on bundled products. Inflectra does not offer a free trial.

10

SeaLights

Best enterprise quality governance and software risk scoring

Pricing is available upon request.

SeaLights is an enterprise software risk scoring tool that enables software development teams to implement quality governance at scale.

SeaLights automatically identifies, analyzes, and flags software quality risks in real-time throughout the SDLC, empowering software teams to deliver quality at speed.

SeaLights pricing information is currently unavailable.

Need expert help selecting the right Testing Software?

We’ve joined up with Crozdesk.com to give all our readers (yes, you!) access to Crozdesk’s software advisors. Just use the form below to share your needs, and they will contact you at no cost or commitment. You will then be matched and connected to a shortlist of vendors that best fit your company, and you can access exclusive software discounts!

10 Best Quality Engineering Software Summary

Tool Free Option Price
1
New Relic

Best for AI insights using natural language via a chat interface

Free version available

From $49/user/month Visit Website
2
Appsurify TestBrain

Best for faster test feedback

60-day free trial

$59/seat/month Visit Website
3
Sympli

Best tool for collaboration between designers and developers

Free Trial

$22.5/month Visit Website
4
Apexon

Best for implementing test automation within your workflow

Not available

Customized pricing upon request Visit Website
5
CucumberStudio

Best collaboration tool for behavior-driven development

14 Days Free Trial

$33.65/per user per month (€29/u/m) Visit Website
6
Katalium

Best open-source testing automation tool

Not available

Visit Website
7
Perforce Suite

Best software quality assurance suite for devops

Free Trial

Visit Website
8
LinearB

Best software quality engineering tool for managing team health

“free forever” trial for up to 8 devs (with 45 days of data retention).

$15/dev/month Visit Website
9
Inflectra Suite

Best holistic application testing product ecosystem

Free Trial

Visit Website
10
SeaLights

Best enterprise quality governance and software risk scoring

Not available

Pricing is available upon request. Visit Website

Types of Quality Engineering Tools

Let’s take a look at some of the different types categories of QE tools and how each of them addresses the needs of your product and team. I’ve linked out to further reading material where applicable. 

DevOps

DevOps tools seek to remove siloes in product development, encouraging collaboration between teams across the application lifecycle. This cross-functional collaboration is crucial to quality engineering methodologies as improved communication leads to better alignment and fewer errors and do-overs.  

Examples:

Testing

Testing tools enable quality engineering by allowing stakeholders to design and deploy tests throughout the application lifecycle, accelerating development while promoting quality. Tools such as testing automation and continuous testing tools flag risks early so that fixes can be deployed well in advance of the product going live.

Examples:

Analysis & Analytics

Analytics tools facilitate quality engineering by collecting and analyzing data to identify patterns and track metrics such as performance and efficiency. When paired with AI and machine learning, data analytics tools can have powerful capabilities for flagging risks and flaws as well as making predictive suggestions or even automatically implementing solutions.

Examples:

Infrastructure

Managed infrastructure services are increasingly popular as they help to ensure that applications have sufficient back-end capabilities to perform, sync, and scale as required, with minimal latency and downtime––and minimal maintenance required.

Examples:

Related Read: LEADERSHIP IN TEST: A GUIDE TO INFRASTRUCTURE AND ENVIRONMENTS

Development

Development tools range from project and ticket management tools like Jira to code repository management tools, design, and modeling tools, code compilers, code editors, to testing and analysis tools––essentially anything that helps developers to design, build, test, and deploy quality software. 

Examples:

Collaboration & Productivity 

Collaboration and productivity tools power quality engineering by facilitating effective project management, scheduling, work division, and communication. This helps to ensure that projects run on schedule and on-spec and give project managers greater visibility into team health as well as risks that may impact timelines.  

Examples:

  • Note Taking/Collaboration
  • Application Lifecycle Management (ALM)
  • Agile Management
  • Instant Messaging/Meetings/Collaboration
  • Mind Mapping Tools

Security

Security tools or DevSecOps tools enable teams to embed security compliance protocols and vulnerability management throughout the software development lifecycle. Automation plays an important role in enforcing security standards and testing for and detecting vulnerabilities. 

Examples:

Related Read: 6 MAIN PENETRATION TESTING TYPES TO UNCOVER VULNERABILITIES

Cloud-Based Services

Cloud-based services such as APIs make it easier (and faster) to roll out high-quality features or deploy tests without having to build everything from scratch. Whether it’s outsourcing your helpdesk or integrating a plug-and-play chat feature into your app, there are thousands of SaaS products available that can significantly improve your application quality and user experience without adding to your team’s workload.

Examples:

  • Cloud Testing Service
  • Help desk/service management

Utility

Utility software encompasses a wide range of tools designed to help analyze, configure, optimize or maintain computers to ensure optimal operation. Utility tools like remote desktop clients help to test how your software performs on different devices and operating systems and can be invaluable in troubleshooting and addressing mismatches between software requirements and system capabilities.

Examples:

  • Remote Desktop Client
  • Natural Language Processing (NLP)
  • Terminal Emulator

What do you think of these quality engineering tools? 

Have you tried out these tools? Did they work for you? Do you have a useful tool that we missed? Let us know in the comments, we’d love to hear from you!

If you found this guide useful, consider subscribing to The QA Lead newsletter for the latest insights from top thinkers in the quality software niche.

If learning from an internationally renowned, award-winning software engineering consultant, author, and coach is your thing, here's an article you should definitely check out: LEADERSHIP IN TEST: MANAGING PERFORMANCE TESTING.

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By Mieke van der Merwe

I'm Mieke van der Merwe, a digital marketer specializing in long-form content marketing and SEO.

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