A few months back, Hridaynath, a retired bank employee in Bhubaneswar received a telephone bill of Rs. 10,000. Several times higher than the usual amount, it had numerous calls, never made from home. Finally the telephone authorities clarified that there was an error in the billing software—a common instance of software testing failure.

With increasing dependence on software usage in our daily lives, software testing, a chore once left to the lesser mortals of the IT industry has come a long way. With close to 150,000 testing professionals making up roughly 20 percent of the Indian software fraternity, the domestic IT industry requires another 16000-18000 in the next one year. Fuelling this demand is the emergence of Independent Software Testing (IST) firms.

Shashi Reddy, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of AppLabs, an IST firm in India, feels that the numbers of ISTs are going to escalate in the next two years. “There would be independent testing companies of $200 to $300 million revenue emerging from India. This speaks volumes about the number of testing jobs in the country.”

Currently firms are looking out for test engineers with experience either in testing or development. “An understanding of software quality metrics in a particular testing practice is vital. A techie should also understand various operating systems and technical platforms like Java, Unix .NET or Macintosh,” avers T. Srinivasan, Managing Director-India of Mercury.

Emerging trends
“Testing career is moving towards technology specializations like SAP, Communications Testing and service specializations like Test Automation, Test Consulting and Performance testing,” says Ananda Rao Ladi, General Manager—R&D Services, MindTree Consulting. As companies look to outsource their testing processes, automated testers working on global delivery models are largely in demand.