The phrase "a number of software tools" is correct and usable in written English.
You can use it when referring to multiple software tools that are available or being discussed.
Example: "In our project, we utilized a number of software tools to enhance productivity and streamline our workflow."
Alternatives: "several software tools" or "various software tools".
To help the session leader in preparing an experiment, a number of software tools are needed.
In order to address this issue, recently, a number of software tools and research works have arisen to provide collaborative solutions.
Within the European collaboration project SUSREG a number of software tools for sustainable urban planning were applied and tested in the context of real case studies.
While there, he designed a number of software tools including some useful for composing and performing music with multiple, independent, smoothly-varying tempos, which resulted in his composition Aberration (2010) for percussion trio and continues to inform his current work.
Though there are a number of software tools available these days to help calculate an aerial's parameters, antenna design is nothing short of a black art practised by an engineering priesthood.
Analysis and visualization of metainformation and analytical data is supported by a number of software tools, which can either be used as 'plug-ins' of the PANGAEA clients or as standalone applications, distributed as freeware from the PANGAEA website.
The authorities would turn to any number of software tools to sort through huge quantities of data, and visualize links between suspects, locations, and other points of reference.
Or the clients themselves would choose weak passwords that could be broken by any number of software tools widely available on the Internet.
As a result, only a limited number of software tools based on this approach exist (e.g., GinSim [ 17], SQUAD [ 18], and CellNetAnalyzer [ 13]).
The executed experiment is the first one to have a holistic approach on the evaluation of people-process-technology triangle, testing a large number of software tools (all together thirteen) and software combinations on the transfer of complex geometrical data, but also on usability.
Consequently, a great number of software tools that provide, inter alia, support for practices based on user stories have emerged in recent years.
