BANGALORE, INDIA: Those who say software testing as a career is inferior to software development need to get a sanity check done. Software testing is as important as software development activity. Do you know how much a simple software mistake can cost you? Rs. 1 lakh, 2 lakhs, 3 lakhs...?? No clues?

$125 mn!!. Yes, in the year 1999 when NASA lost the $125 million Mars orbiter, a spacecraft that was meant to be launched in space to study Martian climate, weather, CO2, etc. This happened due to a flaw in its software.

Actually, there were two different teams involved in the mission-Lockheed Martin Engineering which built and developed Mars Orbiter for NASA and the other was the NASA flight team-both of which used their own units of measurement during the operation.

Lockheed Martin engineering team used English units of measurement while NASA's team used the conventional metric system for a key spacecraft operation, which caused the navigation information to go haywire and the spacecraft crashed.

Had proper procedures for the navigational software been followed, this irregularity might have been detected and the loss could have been averted. This is a classic example that shows the importance of having good software testing practices at place and the consequences one might have to face for not following them.

Arun Rao, Vice President, Global Human Resources, AppLabs A Testing professional needs to understand the technicalities of databases, languages, GUI frameworks and OSes. He also needs to have analytical sense of mind and the ability to break open applications that seem to be perfect, and that how he can find loopholes in the applications. Today, organizations don't just want testers to have knowledge of testing but also require to have business domain knowledge, as well.

Mukesh Sharma, Founder & CEO, QA InfoTech The demand for niche skills like SOA testers are on the rise. Also, there are lot of avenues in test automation areas - scripting skills in the tools languages like VB, Java and other scripting languages like Perl, Shell, Python etc. Technical resources with capabilities to evaluate automation tools, create automation framework and reusable components are on demand. There is always a demand for good performance testers who can analyze performance test results, identify the bottlenecks and recommend tuning techniques.