121T complements unit and component testing. The risk-based planning in 121T helps identifying capabilities whose testing should migrate from end-to-end tests to lower level testing.
Our software test automation provides ways to address automation of acceptance testing, of critical end-to-end system tests done through the user interface, of testing the user interface component itself.
Another important use is to perform “semantic monitoring” of a distributed architecture. Automatically running a dozen of usage scenarios in a periodic way collects a lot of information of the health status of the underlying components, by simulating what real users do. This is complementary to using software monitoring tools, such as Nagios or Zabbix: the latter are normally not appropriate to simulate realistic, deep, usage scenarios.