Is usability testing for specialists only?

In recent years, usability testing has been the subject of growing interest, resulting in an explosion of methods and techniques. Although the HCI scientific and industrial communities acknowledge the merits of user interface evaluation, how to proceed in practice is still unclear. Usability testing is considered to be time consuming, unreliable, limited in scope, and based on expert experience. This reputation will continue spreading as long as no framework is made available to non specialists for selecting evaluation methods in a secure and effective way.