Overwhelmed by lack of automation (Score 1)

Of course the original user is right in saying that there is "a mind-numbing number of incompatible drivers, unsupported devices, unsupported applications, unsupported data, patches, updates, upgrades, 'known issues' and unknown issues"... but it is only mind numbing if you try and do it manually and by researching everything for yourself. At ChangeBASE we have spent years building the rulesets to test for all these things automatically. It is impossible to do this without automation unless you are prepared to employ an army of people for months to try testing the apps for you. Lets look at a simple analogy. Software deployment. Back in the days before people used the likes of SMS to distribute their software they used armies of people to go round, install new apps, and reinstall apps that got broken by other apps installing :). Nowadays that is generally handled by software distribution systems. Unfortunately the mindset has not yet changed on a wide enough scale for people to look at the area of application compatibility testing in the same way. they still see it as a big manual headache whereas they need to be employing tools to simply and effectively identify all those incompatibility issues. Simple numbers? if it takes a tester 1/2 a day to test an app and he has 1000 apps that is 2.5 man years of work. You can get the same or BETTER answers in a few days with automated testing software!