From a release perspective, most of us have at some point in time heard the following statements – “Have to release it, Cannot move the date any further, Need to work extra hours/weekends to get this across the line”. On projects using Agile methodologies often the statements are – “Testing is the bottleneck, Testers did not allow us to meet the sprint commitment, need more testers on the last day of the sprint”. The introduction of Agile methodologies has reduced cycle time drastically (e.g.scrum projects wanting a potentially shippable increment that is fully developed and tested at the end of every sprint). Testing needs to keep pace with the reduced cycle time. Customers change their minds at short notice and we need to be able to adapt without compromising quality and still delivering on time. We can no longer afford to do testing in the traditional way. Test automation is often cited as the silver bullet to the problem. What else can be done? In my talk, I am going to discuss multiple techniques that I have used (e.g.applying the 80-20 principle to testing, dependency-based testing, use of test scenarios as acceptance criteria, etc.). The intent is to provide you a set of ideas you can build upon as you embark on your journey to optimize testing in your organization.