I knew that the testing lab was a great place to gain efficiency based on my previous startup experience. With manual testing you can't reproduce problems as readily and the breadth of test-case coverage isn't as high. With more automation, you can focus your QA [quality assurance] team on making a difference, versus manual re-cabling to run nightly tests.

We didn't want to hardwire our boxes together. And in some cases we wanted to go directly between boxes without the potential interference of an agent in between them.

I wasn't interested in test lab cost savings; I was interested in maintaining an exceptional level of product quality. To do that, I needed a lab that could scale, execute at high speeds, and amortize expensive equipment as effectively as possible. We'll always have more engineers generating code than equipment to test it; it's the nature of the business.