In a rapidly evolving testing ecosystem that already takes advantage of disruptive elements like cloud and mobile, output of testing goes beyond verification into provision of real-time quantitative data for business release decisions.How did we get here?The prevalence of mobile devices necessitated a suite of testing tools that could properly address the mobile context, not just traditional testing on a single form factor.The downward pressure on development cycle times meant that test case reusability and automation, especially for regression, became critical features.Continued maturity in cloud use cases meant that convenience and accuracy could both be achieved through virtual provisioning and teardown of test systems.With more organizations using Agile for development, data transparency from testing became an essential component in determining whether a set of failed or incomplete tests were an acceptable business risk for launch.Understand where we are now:Mobile and cloud testing continue to mature.Both mobile and cloud are hard to test effectively. We are seeing vertical expansion in this area related to mobile performance, network, and compatibility testing as well as cloud security and performance testing. Virtualization and automation are key components in delivering more accurate testing.We are seeing virtualization used to simulate device functionality (with testing tools now offering a suite of virtual mobiledevices) and application integration (through service virtualization). The ability to provision labs that more closely approximate production eases some of the deployment conjecture and extrapolation necessary in the past.Test output can feed into business decisions.Testing tools provide transparency into domain-specific data to help drive go/no-go decisions based on business risk and policies.Know where we are going:Applications will continue their trajectory around an increasingly distributed footprint.Testing complexity will increase as more devices are interconnected.Device and service virtualization have started (and will continue) their upward trajectory into business policy and compliance management to permit some level of business/development cohesion.