Have you ever had the opportunity to stop and look at every process you perform on a daily basis to see if it's an efficient or effective process? Many of us in the Testing world barely have the time to scratch our royal behinds due to the time constraints we're put under to get a product out the door to meet some committment that has been made by some Sales or Business Executive who has absolutley no friggin idea what it takes to design, build and test something! The point I'm trying to make is that if we do take some time to analyze what we're doing manually to see if it could be automated we could actually save ourselves some additional time.

Many companies still use spreadsheets to drive a lot of their Test Planning, Creation, Execution and Defect Management processes. Many are unaware of some free testing tools or relatively cheap tools that could automate many of the manual processes that they carry out on a daily basis. Take for instance comparing data from one release to the next, I have encountered many companies on my consulting travels that would sit for hours and compare line by line looking for differences when they are tools out there like Beyond Compare by scooter software www.scootersoftware.com that for a few hundred dollars could save hours and hours of human prone error work.

Bugzilla is a defect management tool that can be acquired that will automate your defect management process pretty easily and has add-on's like Testopia to help with the test management effort- you can see all the add-on's at http://wiki.mozilla.org/Bugzilla:Addons.

Here's a few web-sites to check out tools that are either free or you pay mega bucks to purchase:

http://www.softwareqatest.com/qatweb1.html
http://www.aptest.com/resources.html#mngt