Bangalore, December 9 2012: Mobility and the Cloud are the two stimulii driving software testing industry as it enters what is being called its iteration. The 12th Annual Annual Software Testing Conference (STC) 2012, held here for two days last week had as its theme, Testing Enterprise 3.0 - Reimagining the Business, even as it drew 800 plus delegates and some 35 organizations which shared their experience, particularly in the emerging areas of technology-based testing – mobile, web-based and service-oriented.
For India’s young and ever growing community of software programmers, testing has always something of a mixed blessing -- boring to checkout someone else’s coding – but challenging ( and rewarding) to tweak applications just so they work to perfection and beat the competition.
If some 10 in 100 programmers in India took to testing a decade ago, the number has grown three fold today, explained Pradeep Chennavajhula, CEO & Co-founder, Edista Testing Institute, a sister unit of QAI, the leading global consulting and workforce development firm that organises the STC every year. Enterprise clients have grown almost four fold meanwhile, but technology is a shifting goalpost and testing has become increasingly automated today -- so perhaps there is still scope one in four engineers to stake out a career in testing, Pradeep felt.
Developments like the cloud have allowed enterprises to shift their infrastructure to a more cost effective plane – and testing industry has responded with cloud-based services. This has had an interesting offshoot – the rise of the independent testing expert who increasingly leverages a variety of portable devices. Agencies like Edista have had to recognize this reality and respond with traning and solutions that this more competitive, technology-driven testing ecosystem demands. It has partnered with TestPlant, the developer of a robotic test tool product called eggPlant, which boasts of an innovative non-invasive 'search and compare' functionality that automates screen testing for any screen-based device: PC, smartphone, or tablet.
The expo alongside the STC featured some half a dozen testing solution and service providers like HP, Pearson, Neotys, Parasoft and Datamatics each of whom could point at a loyal client list in India. The France-based Smartesting spoke of having considerable success with its USP -- model-based testing -- among leading corporates here.
A n October 2012 study by Research and Markets expects the global software testing services business to grow at a healthy 5.16% CAGR. The top players it cites includes Indian companies like Infosys, TCS, Cognizant, Wipro, HCL, Tech Mahindra and Hexaware as well as major MNC opertors in India like IBM, Accenture, CapGemini and HP. Clearly there are – literally – testing times ahead – which in this industry is good news, not bad.