BANGALORE, INDIA: Software testing is one of the fastest growing market in India. However, the rapid changes in the market, caused by the tumbling economy, has raised apprehensions on how to move forward and emerge successful.

"Recession has changed the picture fundamentally for the industry and testing will survive because of changes," said Gangadhariah C P, senior vice president and global head – Testing Services, Wipro.

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While speaking at the 9th Annual Software Testing Conference by QAI, here today, he further mentioned that the last one year's downturn has lead to changing dimensions and it is the best time to adopt them otherwise it would be dangerous.

Entering New Dimensions

One of the important changing phase noted at the event was that the testing industry can play a key role in providing successes to the overall business.

Makrand Teje, president and CEO, AppLabs said, "Testing has reached a maturity and now can be called as career tester."

He further noted that in the past testing was only regarded by ISV's or IT organizations. But today even the enterprises are realizing the importance. Apart from platform, services and network providers, they have started thinking of independent testing.

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Speaking on the same lines Gangadhariah added that testing has taken to a higher pedestal with areas like model based testing, tool based testing providing greater value,

"Testers should merely not look testing as an activity but should focus more on the business value they would be able to deliver to the end user. Functional assurance is taken for granted, what they need to look at is how are they differentiating in terms of business value," he said.

How to Adapt Change?

After getting to know where the industry is leading to, the question remains how to go about it. What are the steps that a tester need to take in this changing environment?

According to Gangadhariah, testers need to become credible advisors to support the customers to obtain success out of business. Survival of testing depends upon the survival of their customers, hence the alignment with business process is necessary. Providing value with innovation in business, process as well as delivery is important.

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He suggested that testers need to wait and watch the emerging technologies (SaaS, cloud computing, social networking, virtualization) getting adopted as a mainstream. They should think of how can these disruptive technologies be made practical and useful to the customers. Even the organizations should encourage their engineers in learning them.

Taking advantage of Indian expertise in testing