“The Software Testing Industry employs about 1,30,000 people, and this number is likely to grow with industry demands”

Even the recession has proved that organizations won't compromise on quality, and therefore quality and testing of software products are important processes and are also recession proof. We had a chance to interact with Pradeep of Edista Testing Institute and he talked about the market scenario in India and the kind of aptitude and skillset an individual should have who wants to be a successful software tester

Q> The IT industry in India is very successful and growing, but how big is the software testing industry and how is the market scenario like?

Software testing market can be broken into two sections, one section is where organizations view software testing as a part of the software development lifecycle, as each software produced has to be tested. So the traditional segment has been one in which development and testing is put together in application development space. Then there is a new trend happening--outsourced testing services. Organizations are keen to validate the product for delivery that they are taking through a third party, because then there's much more credibility to the whole cycle of validating the quality. The outsourced testing field if you look worldwide is estimated to be USD 59 billion worth of business across multiple industry segments, ranging from banking and financial services to high end engineering activities like avionics. Everyone uses software today in one form or the other, and there is criticality involved that the software should work as desired otherwise it could cause trouble, the trouble could range from loss of money to death; take the case of software involved in avionics not being up to the mark, which can therefore endanger the lives of passengers.

Out of the USD 59 billion of the outsourced software testing business, the outsourced work that comes to Indian subcontinent is estimated at USD 13 billion. This is the amount we are expecting to receive by the year 2011. As of date we do USD 9 billion worth of business in the field of software testing. Currently it employs 1,30,000 people in the field of software testing, and that number is also likely to grow with industry demands.

While the application development and maintenance industry has been there for 14-15 years, it has kind of stabilized to reach a 19% growth rate as an industry. While they continue to innovate on the design. They found software testing as one interesting business line, which was coming up as real critical concern from many organizations that claim to be quality conscious. Such organizations found this domain as a very good business to get into. So the real trend in software outsourcing started 6 years back in India. The interesting part of these past 5-6 years has been that the testing industry grew at about 47-48% CAGR (compounded angle growth rate). So the top organizations have already grasped this opportunity and have gone in-depth into this field and replicating all development models into testing.

Q> What kind of work is happening in software testing domain and what is the breakup of manual testing efforts viz-a-viz automated testing?

The majority of the work done by these organizations remains in the manual testing with little automation. 70% of what we do is manual testing today, and the primary focus is towards the functional aspects of the software. The non-functional aspects like security, reliability, and usability are certainly the emerging areas in the field of software testing today and lot of people are expected to build their skill and capabilities into these areas as well. So you are now not expected to do only functional testing but are also involved in some specialized testing like performance, reliability and usability etc as well. And automation is another area where they are spending a lot of money. Why, because automation adds non-linearity to the business. Automation can run as a 24x7 kind of operation which is a strong advantage, and cost investments will justify the returns as well.

So, broadly, manual functional testing is 70% and the major customers come to us are from the US and the UK. Though the European countries are yet to bite the bullet with Indian numbers, yet there is a strong trend of them coming to us. India, interestingly sits in a very nice position across the world given our strength in IT. So, today we get 65-70% of the outsourced work that comes to India. The number is $59 billion worldwide, out of which $13 billion is outsourced, of which $9 billion i.e. 70% comes to India. This $9 billion worth of business is majorly done by large number of corporations ranging from tier-1 companies like TCS, Wipro to HCL, Satyam etc. And there are also niche players like AppLabs, and Maverick that specialize only on testing services as their core business. And we have many MNC companies who have setup offices in India purely for testing business as they find access to talent much better in India.

Q> What kind of skillsets and aptitude should an individual have to become a successful software tester?

If you are a cop and have to catch a thief, then you should not just think like a thief, but be brilliant than the thief and actually you should be able to think three steps ahead of the thief as well. In the same manner, the trend in the software testing field has been that the people are expected to have high degree of analytical skills because you are supposed to find a defect in the work of an intelligent person. The programmer himself is intelligent and in his work you've to find an issue. So, obviously you are expected to be little more analytical and the time that is given to you is much lesser than the time programmer took for the development. So the software tester has to be conceptually strong on the programming language, on the domain front and on the way the software is developed. So, in all a software tester should have higher analytical capability, higher aptitude on quant and mathematics, and he must have strong communication and articulation skill, strong understanding of his domain, and in addition to that it is preferred if he has strong understanding of automation tools as well. Logical and critical thinking is what really makes the difference in software testers. On the aptitude front, the person would be more persistence and patient, as it can happen that he wouldn't be able to find defects in a good work. He has to be persistent to think out of the box to check for quality in the product. Software testing requires being patient and analytical, it is more like a hunting job rather than farming.

In addition to this, it's the domain skills which the industry is expecting an individual to pick up today, i.e. you should know a little about banking, a little about insurance and henceforth. It is in a way necessary because in testing if you don't know the domain your ability to question the functional process of the system is weak. For example, if a banking system has to be tested, testing of login and password is an easy task, but if I've to check that the tax regulatory process has been properly coded or not, then obviously the understanding of tax regulations becomes necessary to test the application. Then one can ask intelligent question to the system and check whether it is performing as required or not. Given that organizations have already specialized in various verticals like banking, insurance, product testing etc., there is a need for an individual to align himself to this kind of domain orientation to be successful. If the candidate doesn't have that, then there is no doubt that organizations invest in imparting such domain knowledge to the employee. But it is an essential skill that organizations expect in their employees.

If you ask me what is the breakup of these skills; it will be process skill, as to how the individual performs the job of testing a product. Number two would be the knowledge of the domain, be it banking or insurance or finance, etc. The last is the technology angle where the individual needs to understand the automation, programming language, operating system, databases etc. so that he can also handle the technology side as well.

Q> What trends do you see in software testing?

The world has moved out from client server architecture to web apps quite some time back. And software testing can be categorized into enterprise and individual segments. In enterprise computing, you have web applications and legacy systems continuing to share equal share. When you come to non-enterprise segment which is primarily the individual segment, there you see a large number of apps on the mobile. So, mobile application development, mobile product development and with the slew of tablets coming in, this segment is really going to heat up. Enterprises would still be 25% of the overall business and that portion will be very valuable as rich enterprises spend USD 10-12 million in quality testing. Applications for the enterprise segment would be like billing system for Vodafone, software that controls the fuel-injection in Boeing aircraft. Whereas an individual would be spending USD 12-15 but here you are talking about millions of such users asking for testing the apps. An individual application would be like angry birds for mobile devices. So, people would not move away from enterprise computing at all, and enterprise computing will become lot more complicated and would start emphasizing on technical side of testing which is performance, usability, security etc. and would make testing a more specialized form of testing. In the individual market, functional testing will become hot because of the complications of the technologies like Android, iPhone and their technical aspects.