Here's a great posting by Sara over at Blackstone Technology Group's SOA and Integration Practice , regarding a "flexible, scalable SOA infrastructure testing framework" she and others developed on their Homeland Security Information-Sharing program. She relates "We’ve implemented a highly-efficient and data-driven framework to test an enterprise-scale, highly available SOA infrastructure environment. In the same amount of time that it took to previously build a single test scenario, we were able to develop the initial framework implementation that can quickly support multiple scenarios that include any permutation of components and transports." In other words, look to new SOA-driven testing frameworks and approaches like these, to most thoroughly and efficiently test new SOA/ESB infrastructure deployments. The "old ways" won't work.