India poised to emerge leader in outsourced testing

India is poised to capture a major share of the worldwide software testing market.

This is because of the established and dominant IT service sector, presence of organisations with matured processes and practices, and the versatile IT skill-set of testing professionals, said Arunkumar Khannur, managing director, QSIT (Quality Solutions for Information Technology).

He was speaking at the annual International Conference on Software Testing in Bangalore.

The worldwide testing market is estimated at $13 billion. The global outsourcing testing market opportunity in this year has been estimated at $4.5 billion, of which, nearly $3 billion will be offshored to cheaper destinations.

"India has the potential to corner 70 per cent ($1.82 billion) of the outsourced testing market. The compounded annual growth rate for the independent outsourced testing market is estimated at 56 per cent while the independent offshore testing has been estimated at 92 per cent over the next four years. The size of the testing market in India is estimated to be between Rs 150 crore and Rs 200 crore," Khannur added.

Software companies, from India and abroad, are investing in establishing 'centres of excellence' to effectively tap this growing market.

He added that a survey on the recruitment consultants in IT and ITES sectors conducted recently in Bangalore showed 24 per cent of the recruitment were in software testing "" highest after call centres (47 per cent).

It is estimated that Bangalore alone needs about 8,000-10,000 testers and about 16,000 to 18,000 in India.

Zohar Gilad, vice-president "" strategy, Mercury, added: "The issue of quality is no longer restricted to mature markets. Therefore the IT challenges faced by an organisation's transition into a global player is enormous and testing will play a crucial role in the evolution."

Added S Sadagopan, director, IIIT-B: "If software testing needed to be an engineering discipline, it would have to get integrated into the process of production, not as a post-thought. Testing is not only to find defects but also to prevent it, be it in design discipline, code discipline and also to check the behaviour of the product. Hence it is appropriate to call testing, which ensures discipline in all other engineering functions, an engineering discipline."

Khannur added: "Moving forward, software testing will enter the next level of maturity demanding expertise in specific domains like embedded systems testing, real-time testing, healthcare systems testing, web-application testing, client server application testing, performance testing, connectivity testing, inter-operability testing and performance benchmarking."