Tools that should be in your software development toolbox
Eliciting Requirements (Business Analyst, Designer)
Visualization and wireframing tools are the bees knees. My favorite is http://www.wireframesketcher.com that integrates with eclipse, can be managed with change control (SVN). I was a proponent of doing this on a piece of paper (but wireframesketcher makes for even LESS throwaway) while allowing a document
Capturing Requirements (Business Analyst)
I used to try to capture things in UML — I still think class diagrams and sequence diagrams are great, but there weren’t good tools for it. http://www.objectaid.com is good for UML in Eclipse (also Green). There might be better paid for tools, but I like these two.
Also for sequence diagrams, I really think http://www.websequencediagrams.com/ has the right approach. Plus styling to make it look like you wrote it on a napkin. I found that too often there were edge cases that could be captured in UML if you knew the right syntax, but even if you did, the person READING the UML had to know it as well. This is where I found comments (little notes) to be a better mechanism for the explanation. There is another tool I found: http://sdedit.sourceforge.net/example , but have not used which supports multithreading, etc.
I’ll update this post with other tools that I think are useful. Like a carpenter, I have a bunch of tools in my toolbox. Tools make the difference. I’ll include tools for source control, build, etc.