The Extended Enterprise - consists of an organization and its operating environment including its employees, its suppliers, its customers, etc. Information connects all of them. An enterprise of today relies on the reliability of its IT systems, whether built in-house or procured, and integration with external entities to enjoy a seamless and efficient operation. For e.g. the Internet has become a sales channel, a customer relationship management channel, supply chain management channel. Technology makes this possible. In this scenario, a higher level of complexity has crept in - one that has potentially multiple break points due to multiple intersection points. In addition, changing regulations require comprehensive modifications to IT systems.

Therefore, prior to implementation, any IT system or product has to be tested for multiple aspects - functionality, reliability, usability, security, compliance, performance to name a few. All of this requires specialized expertise to be readily available. More importantly, the Quality team needs to be familiar with various methodologies, testing tools, multiple platforms, technologies and more importantly, the business processes.

In this context, testing is a natural candidate for outsourcing. While the complexity itself can be sufficient rationale for outsourcing testing, testing can also be seen as a low-risk approach to outsourcing. It doesn't require significant investments to start with and can be easily handed over to a third-party with minimal touch points or involvement. A vendor providing testing services will be able to provide a more cost-effective option to testing and at the same time, make available varied testing expertise on-demand that would be expensive or difficult to have within an IT department. Some other aspects to consider are:

• Since compliance and domain-specific testing are going to be key drivers for growth, companies need to attract domain experts and functional professionals into this practice. This kind of testing cannot be done using techies or testers.
• Test Maturity Model (TMM) is picking up and may become a de-facto certificate like CMMI in testing service area. We need to start preparing for it

BSI provides independent testing services through its Testing-as-a-Service (TaaS) offering. It incorporates agile frameworks that enable it to quickly establish the right-sized and right-skilled team, integrate with an external development team and establish the requisite process interfaces to take over the testing as an independent activity. The whole objective is to get off the starting block as quickly as possible. These services are provided to both software product companies as well as enterprises.

(The author is Marketing Head with BSIL)