In this installment of FAQ, SQE Trainer Rick Craig answers one of the questions students ask him most often.

In the first installment of this article, Dr. James Whittaker discussed turning testing on its head—to revitalize and improve the value of late-stage testing. James also discussed ideas behind empowering your dogfooders, testers, and the crowd to significantly and efficiently improve software quality. In part two, Jason Arbon discusses the research and engineering experimentation behind realizing these ideas into new tools and processes.

Arguments that moving testing forward in the software lifecycle maximizes the return on investment of testing effort have been made and widely accepted. And it is hard to argue with the results. Software is getting better. But what if a shift away from early cycle testing toward late cycle testing could improve quality even more?

Mughees Minhas is the senior director of product management for Redwood Shores-based Oracle Corporation where he specializes in application testing, database performance diagnostics, and data center monitoring and optimization. We recently had the opportunity to talk to Mughees about the rise of the cloud, market consolidation, and risk management.