There are two aspects to the answer.. backend forms and front-end forms
In each case, when you are building your forms, use lots of form bricks to separate the chunks of form (keeps life easy)
Backend
The vanilla admin area of Joomla (assuming you are on 3.x) is based on Bootstrap 2, so you can use the tabbing code here
getbootstrap.com/2.3.2/javascript.html#tabs
Frontend
This is largely dependant on your template so is very hard to call. Default Joomla templates and a lot of the modern ones also use bootstrap 2 or 3.
When you build your component, you will have a view such as
myview.php
myview_brick1.php
myview_brick2.php
myview_brick3.php
Just edit the myview.php file and wrap your template calls in the tab code.. here is an example of the above views wrapped in
bootstrap 2 code (bootstrap 3 is different)
<ul class="nav nav-tabs" id="myTabExample">
<li class="active"><a href="#brick1">Brick 1</a></li>
<li><a href="#brick2">Brick 2</a></li>
<li><a href="#brick3">Brick 3</a></li>
</ul>
<div class="tab-content">
<div class="tab-pane active" id="brick1"><?php echo $this->loadTemplate('brick1'); ?></div>
<div class="tab-pane" id="brick2"><?php echo $this->loadTemplate('brick2'); ?></div>
<div class="tab-pane" id="brick3"><?php echo $this->loadTemplate('brick3'); ?></div>
</div>
If the tabs dont work, you need to make sure bootstrap.css and bootstrap.js are bring called (which they SHOULD be)
Hope this puts you on the right track