Software testing is omnipresent & the importance of software testing is undoubted. Testing process is one of the oldest forms of verification & validation carried out by software developer, engineer, practitioner or end user. Landscape of software testing has changed metamorphically with revolution of technology, business expectations, and IT adaptations from domain companies, methodology & ever increasing complexity of applications.

Emerging drivers which are redefining landscape of Software Testing Business

Rapid Adoption of IT systems: Globally as more and more systems are being digitized, the need for testers has increased drastically. The availability of the resource pool that has the necessary domain knowledge is also shrinking which has lead to a resource pool crunch. That said, it would be paramount to ramp-up Business Analysts and Product Primes to acquire the pre-existing knowledge within the domain and innovate upon that knowledge. Bringing testers up to speed then becomes the responsibilities of the Analysts and Product primes. The secondary problem of non-availability of Skilled (automation scripts) testers to perform the necessary functions gives rise to a requirement of machine based frameworks to fill in the gaps of non-availability of the resource pool. This gives rise to the lateral industry of automated code generation for developers speeding solution development as well as automated test case generation aiding the Quality Assurance folks.

Impedance mis-match during knowledge transfer: When the knowledge transfer of the Domain has to flow from the Analyst to the developers and testers, the impedance mis-match in translating the knowledge in terms of articulating the nuances of the innovation and the capability of a tester (as per say) to understand and assimilate that knowledge into the respective Testcases is mind numbingly high. This high mismatch in what was expected to be built and tested and what landed up getting built and tested will lead to heartburns during acceptance scenarios.

Complexity of the Product: The choice of the technologies and frameworks and platforms used in manufacturing and building the solution also adds up to the complexity of the test cycles. ERP implementation, PDLC of a Enterprise Product, SaaS based Solution Delivery, Cloud Compute enabled solutions, Data Center Management, Legacy Integration etc, are not only rich in semantics from a Domain perspective but are also complex to assimilate to understand the breadth and depth of testing strategies required to validate and provide assurance of quality.