The operational overhead related to setting up testing lab environments and infrastructure is costly. This expenditure multiplies exponentially when organizations must support multiple products and release cycles. Effective software testing requires a test lab to be equipped with powerful hardware, abundant computing power, and ample network bandwidth. Since not all release cycles meet deadlines for testing, it’s difficult to fully utilize test labs—which results in higher costs due to maintaining idle IT infrastructure.
Today’s software applications are complex in nature and typically developed for distributed and connected systems. Testing for these kinds of systems is demanding and often causes a large operating overhead for infrastructure. For example, test labs need to house multiple hardware configurations and versions to support different testing scenarios, such as operating systems, database versions, and browsers. Testing complex systems has the added cost of testing on different devices, such as PCs, MacBooks, tablets, and smartphones. Testing can be further complicated because these end points have multiple hardware and software configurations that require investments in technology, people, and processes