As the pace of development increases, testing has more to do and less time in which to do it. Software testing must evolve to meet delivery goals while continuing to meet quality objectives. Gene Gotimer explores how tools like Vagrant and Puppet work together to provide on-demand, disposable test environments that are delivered quickly, in a known state, with pre-populated test data and automated test fixture provisioning. With a single command, Vagrant provisions one or more virtual machines on a local box, in a private or public cloud. Puppet then takes over to install and configure software, setup test data, and get the system or systems ready for testing. Since the process is automated, anyone on the team can use the same Vagrant and Puppet scripts to get his own virtual environment for testing. When you are finished with it, Vagrant tears it back down and restores it to the same original state.
