How Do You Find the Right Tool for the Right Job ?

Arthur B. asks: "Whenever I try to find a software product, I find myself browsing SourceForge, but it's really hard to find something, when I only know the features I want and not the name of the project. It's hard, once I find a software, to gather information about it's reliability (is it a huge collaborative OSS project, an IT giant driven project or an end of term student project). The same is true about package trees in Linux distros. I'd like to ask the crowd: Where do you pick your software (be it commercial or not)? How do you compare different products? How do you know what a software does exactly before using it? Does a website provide this kind of help? Please let me know your tips and tricks."

Comments

Freshmeat

[slashflood]

Get an account on Freshmeat, so you can sort the results of a query by rating, popularity and vitality.

Stay informed and up-to-date all the time and not only if you've been delegated to a project.

Several useful steps.

[hackwrench]

Not in any particular order:
Look up the terms on Google and see if there is an overarching concept involved.

Look for Wikipedia entries for those terms and the overarching concept. See if any of them have links to Wikipedia pages on software.

Do the same thing with sourceforge.

Do a google search for the software you find. That may lead you to pages that say how good the program is as well as other programs that do similar things.

I do this a lot

[L. VeGas]

I do this a lot.
I run a freeware review site [blatant plug] , and I basically scour delicious.org/popular and software, digg.com / software , freshmeat, FileForum Beta News and a few others. I download 'em, try em, and see what's what. It's a little easier for me because I'm limited to freeware, but these are good places to start.