The emergence of the s/w testing market

BANGALORE, INDIA: The testing services market has grown exponentially over the past few years. This signifies a shift in the customer mindset regarding the importance of testing.  Testing, as a service, is gaining traction for five key reasons.

Firstly, with a large number of applications going online, robust testing infrastructure has become an imperative for handling huge volumes of transactions in real time.

Secondly, more and more mission-critical applications coming on the horizon need to be high-performance and high-availability applications. As such, testing them for performance and ruggedness is critical, as many of them are becoming “self-service” applications.

Thirdly, with many testing tools having come out in the marketplace, it is possible to provide fully-integrated testing services in several different environments. Fourthly, many product companies are adopting independent testing, verification and validation to crunch the cycle-time for deployment of their products. Launching a well-tested product early gives product companies a unique advantage of gaining mind and market-share early on.

Finally, the increasing maturity of the offshore software services sector has quickened the growth of the testing services market.

How to get job in Software Testing?

Industry analysts expect the worldwide market for Testing services to grow to $13 billion by 2010, with 45-50 percent (around $6 billion) getting outsourced. India, according to reports, has the potential to garner 70 percent share of the outsourced testing market.

Relevance of testing in the present scenario

With a large number of applications going online through the internet, applications that were once used by business users have now been exposed to large end-user communities. Consequently, any bug in the application directly impacts the brand image and reputation of the company.

This has propelled customers to filter out bugs from their applications. Also, studies show that finding and fixing defects during test execution can cost 50 times more than during the early requirements phase, and as much as 200 times more if left undetected until after production. Hence, it is crucial for companies to adhere to structured testing processes and thereby deliver higher quality systems in lesser time with fewer resources.

The emergence of software testing as an independent discipline has helped reduce the number of bugs in the applications before they are deployed for production. The testing teams are expected to provide an independent perspective on the quality of the application.

This enables the customers in deciding on whether to go ahead with deploying the application. In making this decision, customers need to find a trade-off between the risk of application failure and their time-to-market constraints.

Testing methodologies

Testing is no longer considered as merely an activity in the development life cycle, but indeed runs parallel to the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC). Testing activities start early during the requirements gathering and analysis phase of SDLC. Business analysts in testing play the role of SMEs and help convert these business requirements to use cases that can be understood by testing professionals.

Use cases translate into test scenarios and test cases. These test cases are executed in controlled environment and the results are captured and compared. A good methodology should ensure that all business requirements are captured and mapped ensuring complete coverage. The metrics to be captured and reported should revolve around test design/execution coverage and effectiveness.

At Cognizant, we adopt a strong process-defined culture that adapts itself well to business imperatives. Our innovations spread across the testing life cycle, complement our testing processes and help in ensuring high quality and in reducing project timelines while optimizing cost.

(The author is senior vice president, Testing Practice, Cognizant)