Trying times for testing firms

Lack of adequate talent seems to be the biggest hurdle.

India is on course to becoming one of the leading destinations for offshore software testing with market opportunities expected to rise to $8 billion by 2008.

Software testing is one of the fastest growing segments within the IT services industry. Though, on an average, software services are growing at about 10-12 per cent, testing is growing at more than 50 per cent per year.

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 this, India is expected to corner a 70 per cent share.

Indian testing companies, however, are facing a host of challenges including lack of adequate talent and specialised certification programmes in testing to get youngsters into the profession. The estimated number of testers required in India is projected to be around 18,000 in the coming year, according to a Gartner report.

The key challenge the testing companies face revolves around the talent gap, the need for deep domain expertise, complexity of applications and regulations that prevent offshore access to applications due to data privacy or security reasons, according to G Sumitra, vice-president (testing practice), Cognizant.

"Organisations, such as ours, have found innovative ways of dealing with these challenges. In the absence of specialised testing courses in universities, we recruit raw talent and then put them through training on a testing-specific curriculum. Business analysts are recruited from the industry to provide the domain expertise that helps effective testing. We have also signed the data privacy Act and set up secure connectivity to access regulated applications. Wherever that is not possible, the testing is carried out onsite," she points out.

Things, however, are looking up for this sector. Stating that software testing has emerged itself as a highly-attractive profession, she says.

Cognizant's testing practice, for instance, has seen a 10-fold growth from about 500 career testers to over 7,000 testers in about 36 months. "This rapid growth highlights the importance of the quality of workforce," says Sumitra.

Makarand Teje, chief operating officer and president, AppLabs Technologies, concurs that the demand for testers has grown enormously with testing gaining widespread acceptance the world over in the last three to four years.

Shubendu Banerjee, vice-president of Intelligroup, puts the issue in perspective, saying, "Quality assurance (QA) is not the glamour job of the software world yet. Rather than developing new applications, QA engineers test products built by others. With quality a watchword through the highly-competitive industry, companies do not have the luxury of releasing software that hasn't undergone substantial testing. With importance building on quality and related return on investment (ROI) considerations, quality assurance jobs in India are gaining in popularity."