You already have taken some basic cost-cutting steps and saved your organization money. Now, you are asked to dig even deeper into your testing budget. Where should you start? You may be looking right at the areas to address and not know what you are seeing or what to do about them. Paul Trompeter explains how to take a fresh look at your existing hardware components, re-examine reliability and availability requirements, and prepare for a future scalable environment. Paul discusses how to get regulatory affairs in order, defuse the ticking storage overload bomb, and streamline testing of complex software systems. For each budget killer, you'll learn innovative ways to overcome budget challenges while maintaining an effective test organization. Discover how to slow the spending of your testing budget while increasing the return on your testing investment and, at the same time, keeping your sanity and sense of humor.

Experience has shown that many organizations attempt to automate their testing processes without effective vision, planning, and follow through. As a result, within a year or two, test automation efforts are declared worthless and the tools are moved to the shelf. By creating a centralized team with domain expertise and identifying specific test automation needs, Intuit is able to build, deploy, and test products using a common set of tools, processes, and methodologies they call Autolab. Shoba Raj describes how the Small Business Group at Intuit maximizes its return on investment by utilizing the Autolab. She explores the benefits of time savings, capital cost savings, quality improvements, product health checks, and tool license fee aggregation. Learn how to build a centralized testing team and create your own Autolab that can leverage your services with standard tools, test environments, and processes.

In the coming years, testers will be placed under ever increasing pressure. Joachim Herschmann describes key future trends including the increasing alignment of development and test with business needs, the integration of traditionally separate disciplines, a shared responsibility for quality, and the increased use of testing technology. Joachim describes the experiences of Borland's Linz development lab as a framework for a broader discussion about these kinds of changes and their cultural impact on the organization. He describes the journey from a waterfall-based methodology to an iterative, sprint-based development approach and the integration of developers and testers into a single team of engineers. They found that agile development provided new levels of productivity and value-and posed new challenges of shortened test cycles and a need for new test skills and tools.

As more companies move to agile software delivery approaches, new challenges and dynamics are impacting their testing practices. Organizations face many issues when implementing automation, including selecting tools that are usable and flexible, encouraging non-technical and non-testing staff to contribute tests, enabling open-source integration, and promoting test-driven development. Dietmar Strasser shares his experiences tackling these challenges as many organizations shift from traditional test automation to agile. Learn about the increased importance of testing in the agile development environment; the role that process and tools play in supporting the agile team; the differences between traditional and agile test automation; how to develop fast, automated test scripts; the use of agile and traditional testing methods side-by-side; and how to deal with test automation in a distributed development environment.