CIOL: How does the software testing lifecycle play an important role in the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC)?

Karthik Gopalakrishnan: Time-to-market has always been the most important factor for a company, which is developing a product or delivering a service.

The longer the time taken to get the product/service to the market, the greater the chances of getting beaten by someone else. Moreover, while releases are more frequent and cycles shorter, the cost of failure has increased dramatically.

Unfortunately, in the rush to meet deadlines, the end result is nothing short of being disastrous as the software code testing is often rushed or overlooked. Bugs in software are costly to correct and it is painstaking. The cost of correcting bugs could vary from $150/bug at the requirement stage of the software development life cycle stage to about $15,000/bug at the application maintenance stage.

The test development life cycle contains the following components: 

* Requirements
* Test planning
* Test environment setup
* Test design
* Test automation
* Test execution and defect tracking
* Test reports and acceptance

CIOL: What kind of tips would you offer to fresh engineering graduates who plan to opt for software testing?

Karthik Gopalakrishnan: Quite often, software testing is considered as a less complex task by most of the IT engineers. Fresh engineering graduates have a tendency to think about a career in software development, rather than in software testing. There is a clear salary differential for testing and development in most of the IT services companies.

MNC product captives have taken initiatives to create awareness among engineers in this field. 

Test engineers are an integral part of the development lifecycle and have an equal role to play in all the phases of PDLC as any development engineer. There are instances where the test team is a part of the design and architecture team.

Integrating, testing and QA along the entire lifecycle of a product is key to employee indulgence and engagement for long term.

CIOL: How do you see the future of software testing industry in India?

Karthik Gopalakrishnan: Due to the tremendous impact of the software testing industry, demand for testing professionals is expected to explode.

The demand for professionals is set to grow to over 200,000 professionals by 2010 from about 40,000-50,000 professionals currently.

This growth is going to pose hiring challenges for any firm. It has already led to the spawning of a whole new software testing training market with a number of private institutions offering bespoke courses and certifications.

In the coming years, the software testing market is likely to enter the next level of maturity. This would demand expertise in specific high-end areas such as embedded systems testing, healthcare systems testing, client-server application testing, performance testing, inter-operability testing and performance benchmarking.