Organizations invest millions of dollars in developing and maintaining software products/applications that are core to their businesses and help them to improve their competitive advantage through operational excellence. Continuous changes in business environment forces the organizations to innovate and optimize their business process, resulting in continuous changes in the software applications that support the business processes. As a consequence, delivering applications rapidly that are defect free, scalable, and reliable becomes challenging. Testing becomes a critical and vital step in the process – not only in terms of coverage but also in terms of performance, security and usability. Setting up test environments that closely mirror the production environment can be expensive – in terms of hardware, licenses and people.

The recent sharp downturn in the economy is forcing organizations to reconsider their approach towards IT investments. In a world, where companies are more focused towards improving efficiencies and return of capital employed, CIOs/CTOs need to re-consider how they can reduce their technology investments, or get higher return on the same or incremental investments. Testing is crucial to enhance user satisfaction and reduce support cost. However, testing requires organizations to invest in people, tools and environments and can take up a significant percentage of the available budget. But quality can never be compromised. New ways of development and testing are enabling organizations to ensure higher quality but with significantly lower investments.

Setting up a dedicated, in-house test lab comes with its own set of challenges. Some of the major challenges faced are:

* Infrastructure: hardware & software resources, establishment of proper tools & processes, and other resources like bandwidth. This creates a strain on the overall budget.

* Scalability: To ensure that software works in a real life situation, it needs to be tested in a real life environment. It is not easy for an organization to create a scalable infrastructure that simulates the production environment.