1. 1 The Pressure on Information Technology (IT) "In today's environment, the ability to react quickly to change by reducing the devel opment life cycle in order to be first to market will give a company an important com petitive edge. " -James Martin The market conditions of the 21 st century put business under continual pressure. The most successful companies are those who are able to reduce their time to market, to launch initiatives before their competitors, to respond very rapidly to opportunities in the marketplace or to change direction in response to a move by the competition or a...

Software quality and software testing have for decades been decisive topics in software development. However their potential and their influence on the economical side of software development and operations has been understood more clearly only in the last years. This is illustrated by the increasing number of books such as this one and conferences such as SQM(Software Quality Management Congress) and ICSTEST (In ternational Conference on Software Testing). The era of the commercial Internet has brought about new requirements and new challenges for software quality and testing experts. They...