Software testing market resilient despite crisis: report
March 11, 2009
The worldwide market for computer software and systems testing services is projected to reach US$56 billion by 2013 despite taking a hit from the global economic crisis, a report has said.
The worldwide market for computer software and systems testing services is projected to reach 56 billion dollars by 2013 despite taking a hit from the global economic crisis, a report said Wednesday.
More companies are outsourcing testing services, with India establishing itself as the favourite provider, the report by industry consulting firm Ovum said.
"Both the outsourced and in-house testing services markets will grow over the next four years but not at the heady rates seen over the last four years," it said.
"Despite this slowing, testing services will grow at a compound annual growth rate of 9.5 percent from 2008 to 2013, faster than most other (information technology) services."
Computer software and systems are tested in-house or by specialist companies to evaluate their capabilities and find errors, including potential bugs.
Alexander Simkin, a senior Ovum analyst and author of the report, said India is catching up with European and North American testers in terms of quality while continuing to offer cheaper rates.
"Indian testing services providers used to compete purely on price through labour arbitrage. That's changing," Simkin said.
"They are now climbing the value chain and offering the same capability as North American and European testers."
However, the high demand has resulted in a skills shortage in India "so we could see increasing numbers of testing services jobs going to other low-cost territories such as China, Malaysia and North Africa," Simkin added.
(c) 2009 AFP
Mar 10, 2009 |
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Having worked in software QA for over 20 years I can attest to the lack of quality outsourced testing produces. The testing is all spelled out in contracts. This does not allow individual testers to follow areas that seem weak because it is not in the contract. Often those outsourced testers could not do that even if they wanted because all they do is follow step 1. then step 2. then step... there is absolutely no creativity to testing the software.
I knew when I discovered a bug that allowed the abs() function to return a negative value in the Pascal compiler (Burroughs) when I started doing software testing (after graduating with a BA in Computer Sci) that QA was way more interesting than writing the compiler!
Now, we just let folks who do not have any connection to the applications, nor training in them, do our tests. Management just has no idea about the crap they ship, and consumers just keep buying the crap.
It is truly no effort to find issues with out most popular OS'es and applications. But who cares? It would just cost money to make it better, and why not let our customers tell us what is broken! We can send them a fix.