The benefits of a virtualized test lab environment are compelling and quantifiable--rapid provisioning and tear down of environments, faster test cycles, and powerful new capabilities to resolve defects. Although many test teams have experimented with virtual machines and have experienced some of the benefits, they've also discovered issues with virtual machine "sprawl," difficulties administering the lab, and lack of virtual private networking. Ian Knox provides solutions to these problems and offers ways to simplify both using and managing virtualization in your test environment. Ian describes the basics of virtualization and how you can use virtual labs to solve some of the most pressing and expensive challenges in testing. He guides you through the important implementation choices for building a virtual lab and explores the common pitfalls with real-life case studies.

It seems that senior management is always complaining that testing costs too much. And their opinion is accurate if they consider only the costs-and not the benefits-of testing. What if you could show management how much you have saved the organization by finding defects during testing? The most expensive defects are ones not found during testing-defects that ultimately get delivered to the user. Their consequential damages and repair costs can far exceed the cost of finding them before deploying a system. Instead of focusing only on the cost of testing, Leo van der Aalst shows you how to determine the real value that testing adds to the project. He shares a model that he has used to calculate the losses testing prevents-losses that did not occur because testing found the error before the application was put into production. Leo explains the new testing math: Loss Prevented – Cost of Testing = Added Value of Testing.

AJAX testers and developers have serious challenges developing unit tests, functional tests, and load/performance tests in a time when AJAX and other Web development technologies continue to expand. Frank Cohen explains a proven methodology to identify-and solve-scalability, performance, and reliability issues in AJAX applications. Frank explains how to apply this methodology using open source testing tools, including Selenium, soapUI, TestGen4Web, PushToTest, and others. He demonstrates hands-on testing examples created with the Appcelerator and Google Widget Toolkit (GWT) frameworks. You'll also see how to construct a functional unit test for a business flow, identify ways to create operational test data at run time, validate test responses, and automate the entire test. Learn to use Firebug and Firefox to identify and instrument AJAX user interface elements.

To apply model-based testing (MBT) to many different applications, simply learning the high-level principles is not enough. You need extra guidance and practice to help orient testers and developers to begin using models for testing. Many people attempting MBT, confused about programming around observation and control, try to duplicate the underlying system functionality in models. Keith Stobie shows you real-world MBT case studies to illustrate MBT ideas you can incorporate into your own practices. Learn to apply MBT patterns and practices to both traditional and model-based test design. See abstracting examples and how these abstractions can help testers with any test suite-model-based or not. Learn to create adapters that act as a specialized programming language--similar to keyword-based testing-for the abstractions of your domain under test.