Testing Opportunities Date:   Tuesday , November 28, 2006 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. The outsourced testing market has opened new vistas for testing professionals. Globally pegged at around $3 billion—one third of it is outsourced to India. Reddy sees a huge opportunity and apart from banking and financial sectors—who are already major outsourcers of testing requirements, emerging verticals like pharma, retail, manufacturing and logistics are on the look out to tap this potential. Another interesting trend that has emerged over the last few years is conversion of legacy systems into the web-based interface. As the need for testing web interfaces of legacy applications is growing, techies are increasingly making use of standardized tools, such as Rational, Win Runner, Load Runner and Silk Test from IBM, Mercury and Segue. This has led to innovation in tools in the open source, industrial and usability testing. Moving forward, software testing is set to enter the next level of maturity. Ladi feels that this would demand expertise in specific domains like embedded systems, web-application, compliance and security, inter-operability testing et al. Moreover, consolidation of technology towards multimedia communication tools such as TiVo, IPTV, 3G phones, and other multi-utility devices is breeding a species of multimedia communication testing experts. Overcoming barriers Though a range of career options are emerging in the testing arena, there is still a blasé interest about taking up testing as a career. Many still fail to realize that software testing and development require different profiles. Experts feel that industry and academia should work in tandem and focus on creating a greater level of awareness on the career growth and scale up the training processes on specific skill sets. “At the basic level, there is a demand and supply gap of quantity and quality in comparison with the pace at which the space is growing. The low level of synchronization between the industry and training academies are forcing companies to depend entirely on in-house capabilities to train potential testers,” says Srinivasan. Hands-on training on different configurations processes, testing tools and test enablers, working with test management software and defect tracking tools—are the basic requirements. But, it is essential for testers to take a recognized certification examination on different testing tools and processes and attend workshops to constantly keep abreast of the current testing tools in the market. However, testing engineer Anand Rao warns, “One needs to be very selective while enrolling for a software testing course, because many of these are fake and don’t offer anything to trainees.” One needs to study the institute well in advance and then go for it. Besides, International Software Testing Qualifications Board (ISTQB), International Institute for Software Testing (IIST) and companies like Aztec, ReadyTestGo, STC Software have in-house certification courses and invest significant amount towards skill enhancement of their employees. The future looks bright Many feel that the uniqueness of a testing career lies in the fact that it is a ‘future proof’ career. “The career of a .Net professional will depend upon the future of that platform, but a software tester doesn’t have any such constriction, as testing is ideally done on any software irrespective of its platform. Hence one can also switch to different technology platforms in this case,” explains software trainer Pandav Rao. Though some challenges remain, the future of software testing looks bright. META Group reveals that job opportunities in the testing industry would increase 10 times in India by 2008. Besides career growth, attractive pay packages are yet another reason that draw the attention of techies. The average salary for a software tester with 3-5 years of relevant experience is approximately Rs. 3-4 lakhs per year. A tester with 6-8 years of experience, on the other hand, can make around Rs. 6-9 lakhs per year. Interestingly, testing professionals are now in demand not only in the domestic arena but also readily in the international market—not because of cost difference, but for their technical expertise. Srikanth Renganathan, Head of Test Business Unit, Huawei Technologies India quips “Today, the testing industry is moving from verification mode– “Are we building the product right” to Verification cum Validation mode– “Are we also building the right product”. The test teams in most companies are viewed as internal customers assessing the product from the end customer perspective. This hardly leaves us with any doubt that the Indian tech sector is waking up to the rich potential of software testing.