As companies focus on deriving added business value from their IT services suppliers, more and more enterprises are trying to separate testing from development. A good number of enterprises try and entrust their application development work to development specialists and separate testing from development by handing over testing to independent testing services providers. Currently, more than 25 percent of clients deliberately award their application development/systems integration and software testing to two different parties. This primarily helps organizations to have an objective and external view of the quality of the software developed. Remarkably, the transformation has come about almost entirely within the last decade.

Over the last few years Quality Assurance (QA) has shifted from being tactical to strategic. In the ‘80s / early ‘90s, during the emerging phase of QA, enterprises had a tactical view of QA and an approach that was ad hoc and lacked any defined processes. As the industry continued maturing in the transitioning stage, during the late ‘90s/ early ‘00s there was increased acceptance of QA value propositions, most companies had or at least tried having dedicated test teams and started using some kind of test processes. This phase was lead by several banks and telecom services providers who were among the first to realize that they needed to conduct testing separately.

Then came the transformative or the advanced phase that we are witness to today and is the calling of the future. A chapter that started unfolding in the late ‘00s and will continue to profoundly influence the future of IT services. The tactical to strategic shift in QA - establishment of QA Centers of Excellence and use of advanced metrics for ongoing improvement highlight this phase. This phase is also characterized by organizations trying to abate the pain of testing and putting responsibility on testing vendors by awarding managed testing service contracts.

The software development business is massive and approximately 30 percent of that business is testing. The growth is primarily in three dimensions. Quality management or consulting on Quality Assurance, offshoring - expanding from onsite staff augmentation services to include specialist testing services delivered from an offshore destination like India and last but not the least, innovation, so that customers can benefit from productivity enhancing tools, methodologies and new offerings.

ERP testing, virtual test environments, management of test data and IT infrastructure testing are strong growth/ expansion areas with respect to software testing services. Also as in all other areas of the IT industry, cloud computing is having an effect on testing. When looking at the test infrastructure, the cloud is an obvious area for expansion. But if a client already has the test infrastructure services providers will need to make a private cloud for them. Many applications are being cloud enabled and opportunity for testing many applications that are being converted for the cloud is tremendous.