BANGALORE, INDIA: India is poised to become a leader in the software testing market with an increasing number of companies outsourcing their software testing work to India. Industry analyst Gartner Group finds that testing could make up to 25-50 per cent of software budgets. Of this, independent testing is growing at 50-65 per cent while the part of work done offshore is growing at 35-40 per cent. Another study reveals that the software testing market in India is pegged to touch the USD 2 billion mark in 2007 itself.
India, already being a huge destination for software development, makes it logical for independent software vendors (ISVs) to offshore testing to India resulting in significant cost savings and reducing time-to-market as it reduces the overall product lifecycle. Regulatory bodies in the US & UK are getting more stringent with compliance norms putting an upward thrust to the global software testing market. ISVs are also keen to get their products tested by a third party which has played little or no role in the software development process, also serving as beta users for the products in the process. There is an increasing pressure from the user community also demanding that vendors take up the onus for vulnerabilities in their products, thus the demand for testing of software products is ought to rise further. Organizations are also hiring testing service providers to validate the products (ERP, CRM, etc) which they are implementing.
Testing services in India is increasingly being seen as a specialized offering considering the fact that IT companies have started positioning themselves as independent software testing (IST) services providers, providing software testing as a specialized service. Testing service market in India is looking upwards with the rapid expansion of these IST firms in the country. Testing can now be compared with other IT services in terms of revenue for companies and also in terms of remuneration it is offering. In addition to the pure IST players which are rapidly coming up, majority of the top companies are setting up IST centers to cater to this booming market.
Software testing in India is entering into the next level of maturity. IT professionals in the country are experiencing a change in perception in terms of their approach to software testing and are now considering it as a serious career option. Testing requires extensive domain knowledge and is being considered as an area of specialization in areas like real-time testing, web-applications, web services, compliance, performance, inter-operability, embedded systems, etc to name a few. It is estimated that industry requires around 25,000 to 30,000 testing professionals within a year. To bridge this gap an increasing number of non-IT graduates are being inducted by pure ISTs and even large IT companies.
Software testing is climbing up the priority list of global product companies which is contributing to the increase in offshoring testing services to India. Adding to this is the growth in the domestic software testing market with growth in sectors like BFSI, insurance, government, manufacturing, etc. India Inc. needs to continue its strengthening of capabilities in automated testing and build a pool of skilled professionals with domain and tool expertise to leverage the huge potential in this industry.
