Sunday, August 10, 2008

INDIA ALL SET TO RULE SOFTWARE TESTING MARKET

Durba Ghosh, New Delhi
The Economic Times

India is all set to become a leader in the software testing market with an increasing number of software development companies outsourcing their software testing work here. Industry analyst firm Gartner has pegged the worldwide software testing market at $13 billion and the global market for outsourced testing services to be around $6.1 billion, of which India is expected to corner a 70% share.

Software testing implies checking any IT system prior to implementation for multiple aspects like functionality, reliability, usability, security, compliance and performance. Market players like Hexaware and AppLabs believe that the need for outsourcing software testing has grown due to the high level of complexity and multiple intersection points in modern software.

“The winning combination of cost, communication, exposure to various domains, testing principles and test tools gives a clear edge to India in software testing,” said Hexaware Technologies global delivery head and chief software architect Ramanan RV. While software services are growing at an average of about 10-12% globally, testing is growing at over 50% every year. The market opportunity for Indian offshore testing companies is seen at around $8 billion by year-end, from $2-3 billion a year ago.

“Indian businesses have matured in terms of making IT central to all business processes. Hence, there is a very high level of business dependence on error-free software code,” said AppLabs president and CEO Makarand Teje.

A global case in point is eBay, which experienced a 22-hour outage of its website in 1999 due to software flaws. It cost eBay $5 million in revenue and an 11% drop in share price. The outage affected 1.2 million customers who were either trying to sell or buy something on the website.

Along with the growth witnessed in offshoring of software testing to India, the average deal size of such projects is also on the rise. A few years ago, the average deal size for an outsourced testing project was about $50,000-60,000, requiring a few testers. That has now grown to about $2-4 million per project.

According to Gartner, India will require around 18,000 testing professionals every year over the next three years to fulfill the demand seen in the software testing market.

 

1 comment:

Subodh Singh said...

Must agreed,The most frequently asked questions to me till date are “What is the future of software testing business?” “Should I consider software testing as my career option?” - Now we don’t need to ask these question any more. See the good news below.

Infosys Chief Executive and Managing Director, Mr. Kris Gopalakrishnan estimated global software testing business to reach $13 Billion by 2010. Out of these approximately half of the testing work will be outsourced to India - according to Mr. Gopalakrishnan. That’s great news for Indian software testers.


Mr.Gopalakrishnan was speaking in inauguration of International software testing conference in Bangalore organized by STeP-IN. The conference was aimed to discuss on various software testing opportunities and future of Indian test community.

Currently Indian software testing community is the largest in the industry and hence there is tremendous business competition in Indian corporations. This competition finally leads to quality work and this is helping India to satisfy global customers. India is having immense talent and customers are coming to India for superior work quality.

Software testers and analysts are now key part of any product team. Indian IT giants like Infosys is deriving upto 10 per cent of revenue from software testing services and significantly growing each year.

Irrespective of software testing global or Indian business I have always suggested candidates to choose your career according to your interest. One can make a good career in any field if you have interest and goal to pioneer in that field. Without interest not a single career option will work for you.

So tighten the belts - learn new technologies on software testing, continuously update your knowledge and don’t even think about future of software testing market!