I think there is a real misunderstanding about the importance of the runtime tool. Why would you want to have more than one tool? How many should you have? These are all questions that can be easily answered, but first we need to understand your work environment. I will take you through a simple example for a software development company. This sample company creates a software product called ACME Trakker.

Let’s assume that ACME Trakker has two full time QA Authors. These are the people who write the automation scripts. They also might write the actual test cases. Their product has 300 test scripts in their automation suite. The average test takes 30 minutes to run. The tests include the following variations: They are capable of running against Oracle, SQL Server and MySQL. They also support the major web browsers.

Case 1
· 300 automated tests
· 150 hours to run all automated tests
· One runtime tool
· Two authoring stations

If they have one runtime tool setup in their lab, it will take over six days to run through the entire regression suite. This may not seem like that big of a deal for the entire suite, but let’s assume we find one critical error during the testing on day five. The development group investigates the error and reports that it is a major change that will require a full regression testing to verify. We now will have to do six more days of testing on top of the five we already used to find the bug.

Case 2
· 300 automated tests
· 150 hours to run all automated tests
· Three runtime tools
· Two authoring stations

Assuming a balanced load on all the runtime tools, our new testing time is two days. That same error is we found earlier will take (at worst case) four days to fix and retest instead of the eleven in the first case.