It wasn't even six months ago a Sunnyvale, Calif., company called Mu Dynamics (News - Alert) decided to take a stand against the lengthy testing times developers were experiencing.

The company released a relatively "simple" product - which it called the "Mu Test Suite" - that was loaded with new technology that cut what took months of trial-and-error troubleshooting - the amount of time required to test packet cases and push products to market - into weeks (and even hours, in some cases).

And today, as we continue to migrate, faster than ever, toward next-generation IP networks - and technology like mobile video and IPv6 - Mu's sweet little "Test Suite" package is piquing the interest of a greater number forward-thinking operators and vendors.

Dave Kresse (News - Alert), CEO, sat down recently to discuss the evolution of the Test Suite - and why it's such a future-proof product - and how Mu is approaching the challenges customers are facing.

"There's clearly been a trend of operators and vendors in the midst of deploying next-generation services, and movement into a converged environment," Kresse told TMCnet.

In October, Mu Dynamics unveiled new testing capabilities for its Mu Test Suite Solution to help customers meet key requirements of IP service testing regardless of their specific customer ecosystem - telecom, smart grid, mobile operator or even cloud computing.

With these new and expanded capabilities, Mu told TMCnet it aims to sell the industry's only adaptive testing solution to speed IP service testing by as much as 10 times over traditional approaches to testing.

This adaptive testing approach uses real-world samples of IP service traffic - or test cases built from vendors and operators IP service traffic - to emulate how a network, service or device will actually behave when deployed. More importantly, the Mu Test Suite enables vendors to do this extremely quickly, which expedites both the testing time and the respective products' time to market at a higher level of quality and lower total expense.

"I think what we're seeing as a pretty consistent challenge, as I'm in front of our customers and prospects frequently, many of these organizations are getting pushed faster and faster to innovation," Kresse told TMCnet, in the interview conducted earlier this month. The translation: More testing needs to be done more quickly on products that are increasingly complex.

However, a number of commercial test tool vendors have only written static test cases, which doesn't fulfill what the industry needs.

"The model of a test vendor writing test casts for my specific products doesn't work," Kresse said. "Our product is not about us writing test cases for our customers. For example, a given service provider would use the tool to take traffic from their environment on their voice over IP, and bring it into their solution. Then, they can create more realistic test cases unique for their voice service. It's a much faster model for them. They're able to get the test cases they need much faster."

As recently as five years ago, operators just provided "dumb pipes" so all you had to do was understand the throughput of the network.

Going forward, Kresse said services and business applications are multidimensional, spanning multiple layers.

"From Mu's standpoint, what we haven't seen is vendors in the test space keep up with that pace with the operators and the vendors," Kresse said. "What really needed to introduce a different approach to testing."