According to the industry experts, India has the potential to corner 70 per cent of the worldwide market of about $1.82 billion. The global outsourcing testing market opportunity in the current year has been estimated at $4.5 billion, of which, nearly $3 billion will be offshored to cheaper destinations.

Here arises a big question. Does India have a lucrative market in software testing as well? In terms of credentials, India, with the largest number of SEI-CMM Level 4 and 5 certified firms, is perhaps best equipped to take advantage of this opportunity.

In fact, some smart software firms have rightly sensed this booming opportunity and have started forming independent practices to address the emerging space of software testing.

Industry observers say the compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) for the independent outsourced testing market is projected at 56 per cent over the next four years. And the CAGR for independent offshore testing is even higher. It stands at 92 per cent.

Like the outsourcing concept, which advocates offshoring of an organisation's non-core areas of work, other software firms are realising the need for outsourcing the activity of testing to domain specialist players like RelQ.

The potential that exists in the software testing space is more or less the same as what the offshoring model offers. With the entry of the Internet, computers and software are no longer restricted to the role of internal decision-support tools.

Today, products from cars to computers and mobile phones to washing machines have some kind of software in them and it's only going to increase further, which only means that this industry will offer huge scope and exposure in the years to come.

In the current scenario, software testing is also known as quality engineering. As more and more number of softwares are being invented, professionals are also taking pains to detect the bugs in the software in order to fix them.

Each time a company like Microsoft releases a new version of Windows, it has to first test it and also continuously develop solutions to save it from virus attacks, known as patches. And this is precisely the job of software testers.

Infosys and Polaris have already set up specialised groups to address the software testing space. Infosys offers software testing services as part of its Independent Validation Solutions (IVS) offering.

It also believes that the need for outsourcing of software testing would eventually come even from software service companies.

IT biggies like Infosys and Polaris are eyeing this booming opportunity. RelQ has already emerged as one of the biggest players, with around 500 employees focused on the software testing space.

Source: Economic Times

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