Until an application becomes external and public facing on the Internet for users to see, access to it remains internal to a company's network barricaded by firewalls. Only users on the company's intranet and network can get to the application. Due to this reason, testing such applications from external machines would be impossible unless some firewall rules are changed to allow it. Often, making such changes is time-consuming and sometimes not even allowed due to company policies. The next best thing is to configure the test servers within your company's network that can connect to the internal application under test, while still keeping the company's application private. This is a win-win situation and one you will normally encounter.

Configuring machines for testing from scratch can be a daunting task, especially when the same steps have to be repeated from one machine to the other. Performing such tasks manually becomes mundane and...