Return to the Office, but Not to the Test Lab

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Tom Lynch

It's been two years since COVID-19 forced most businesses to change how they operate. Although many of the changes that caused major disruption will be temporary, others should be permanent. Going back to the office, at least in some capacity, is a welcome return to the way things were. The value of working face-to-face with colleagues and customers goes beyond the obvious benefits of having in-person meetings. It also extends to the nuanced advantages of impromptu hallway discussions and sharing of ideas.

Returning to the office, however, should not mean returning to the test lab. Any organization that relied on employees physically located in their test lab to conduct regular testing suffered major setbacks when their doors closed due to COVID-19. For those companies, network and application testing slowed dramatically because they needed people within the lab to physically move cables and configure networks before a test cycle could begin. This, in turn, delayed product releases and internal projects.

On the other hand, organizations that had previously deployed a test lab automation solution using lab management software and specialized switches experienced little to no disruption.

A test lab automation solution offers many benefits, including the following:

  1. Save money by getting far better utilization of test tools and lab infrastructure, thereby reducing the capital expenditures required for new tools.
  2. Increase testing capacity by reducing the setup time required to configure test scenarios and eliminating problems with cabling infrastructure.
  3. Enable a lab-as-a-service (LaaS) environment in which lab resources are shared, and test engineers no longer need physical access to the lab but can work from anywhere.

Before COVID-19, the top two benefits above were the major drivers for automating test lab infrastructure. After witnessing the impact of work-from-home practices, the third benefit is getting just as much attention.

Read our white paper on using an automated lab infrastructure to drive down costs.

Learn more about NETSCOUT Test Lab Automation products