Software Testing has become an integral phase in the development of software applications and IT-solutions. The convergence and integration of business and technology has raised the risks exponentially of deploying untested or fully tested software.

Experience and both qualitative and quantitative studies indicate that
•	the cost of finding and fixing errors rises exponentially as the development cycle progresses. Errors not caught in development can cost upto 1,000 times more to repair if they reach the live system - severely impacting corporate budgets and IT resources. (Courtsey: IBM Canada Research).
•	there are typically five to fifteen flaws in every 1,000 lines of code. Finding each one takes about 75 minutes. Fixing them takes two to nine hours each. That’s 150 hours – the majority of which is spent testing - or roughly $30,000 to clean every 1,000 lines (Software Engineering Institute, Carnegie Mellon University)

Software errors in live systems can bring businesses to a halt, and can be very costly even if repaired quickly. A company with a $200m turnover and a 40-hour-per-week order processing window can lose upto $50,000 in just 30 minutes. Another infamous example etched in Testing history is the outage experienced by eBay in 1999 ( a much smaller entity then), a result of a flaw in software that escaped undetected. The catastrophe resulted in a 21-hour outage of its website, leading to a revenue loss of $5mn, leading to an 11% drop in share price, and leaving almost 1.2mn customers stranded.

The goal of Testing is to catch such defects and errors early in the life cycle as to minimize delays and cost. The increasing sales of testing products and the growing number of companies implementing Software Testing procedures indicates the growing importance of these services in modern business environment.

What one needs is a sound and effective testing strategy that will be help in identifying critical processes/tasks of the application, assess risks, prioritize and allocate resources accordingly. The focus is on these processes and tasks through the lifecycle of activities, rather than in just the requirement phase. This strategy is one that best optimizes constraints of time, money, new technologies, and quality to deliver business results.