Tapping Global Offshore Testing Services Market
Advantage India

 

The global market for offshore Testing Services is galloping. Software testing is one of the fastest growing segments within the IT services industry. It is growing at more than 50 percent per annum as against an average software services growth of 10-12 percent. This offers a major, untapped opportunity for Indian outsourcing vendors. According to Gartner Inc., the worldwide market for Testing Services is estimated to grow to US$ 13 billion by 2010, with 45-50 percent (US$ 6.0 billion) getting outsourced. Indian IT-BPO players generated export revenues of about US$ 280 million from Testing Services in 2006. A significant potential therefore exists for Indian IT-BPO companies providing solutions in this space. The testing business (offshore outsourced) in India had risen sharply in the span of just three years from a modest $200 million in 2003-04 to $1.52 billion in 2007. A NASSCOM (National Association of Software Servicing Companies) assessment says that most key players in the Indian IT and ITES industry, have in fact, built robust Testing Services portfolios and deployed Best Practices within this segment.

It is but natural for global product vendors to undertake testing of products in India as the country has emerged as a big base for offshore software development. Indian investments in process improvements have helped the firms involved in offshore testing to offer high quality at reduced cost.
Many large software companies have realized that involving specialists brings the maximum value to their products. India has done well in serving the testing needs of such companies, thereby laying strong foundations for this business to grow in the coming years.
Leading IT companies in India today derive up to 10 percent of their revenues from their independent software testing businesses. Over the last seven years, independent testing has rapidly emerged as a fast growing revenue stream for IT services players in the country.
Global product developers are increasingly turning to India to undertake offshore testing of their offerings to leverage the country's cost and skills advantages. Today, Indian IT services providers are testing a vast range of productsfrom high-end platforms on the one hand to Web services on the other. They are testing n-tier applications, desktop applications, device drivers, network firewalls, Web services, operating system components, among others.

Challenges
The rapid growth in demand for software testing services has had a corresponding impact on the supply side. Of all the challenges faced by the industry, the most crucial was the paucity of skilled manpower. In 2006 alone, there was a shortfall of 15,000 software testing professionals in India. This shortfall is stated to be a result of the following:
• The fact that young professionals are not aware of the career potential of the testing market.
• The lack of higher business domain knowledge, process knowledge and client management skills among testing professionals, a major requirement for the market.
• The absence of training and learning programs that cater specially to this market. As specialized software testing as a career has emerged only in the last 7-10 years, academic institutions as well as corporate entities are not geared fully to nurture software testing professionals.
Besides facing up to the talent challenge, Indian testing services providers also need to focus on gaining a better understating of the marketplace to tap into the huge emerging opportunity. Vendors need to determine its needs and understand the trends that are driving solutions development in this segment.
Global business analyst firm Forrester Research, which has undertaken significant studies on the Testing Services market believes it is important for vendors to define the scope of various kinds of testing. Unit testing, Integration testing, Systems testing, System integration testing, User acceptance testing and Implementation testing.
Testing can take various forms and can be conducted by either developers, testers on project teams, testers in centralized testing organizations, customers or IT operations. It can be Manual testing, where a person executes a script, Exploratory testing, where the same thing is done without a script, Automated testing, where software executes a script, Regression testing, where the same script is re-executed to determine whether results have changed, Test-driven development, where the script is created before the software that will pass it and Static analysis, where an inspection of the code is undertaken for different types of anti-patterns.
In a newspaper interview, Srinavas Chandrasekar, Vice President (Testing Practices), Aztec Software & Technologies, said that Indian test specialists had proven skills, experience and the widest range of full-suite testing abilities. “These specialists are more than ready to capitalize on the trend of more and more global software product companies outsourcing their testing requirements,” he said.
It is not that the Indian testing houses have a free run. There are challenges in automation. According to Chandrasekar, the hurdles include - how to automate and how much to automate keeping in mind product release criteria and release time frames. The challenges are further compounded if the product is continually evolving, and needs to be supported on diverse platforms, he said.
Software analysts say that Indian IT-BPOs providing offshore testing services also need to invest in testing solutions to gain three types of capabilities:
• slash the time required for test execution. Test automation tools let IT services companies make an upfront investment in test script creation to slash the time required for test execution from a matter of days to a matter of hours. The value of automation increases with the frequency of repeated test execution, making it especially useful for regression testing and testing across configurations.
• improve the efficiency of test design and execution. Most IT services companies don't conduct any test automation, and those that do never automate all of their test cases. The manual testing capabilities bundled with popular test management tools are widely and heavily used. Tool support for manual testing does much to improve the consistency and efficiency of manual testing efforts.
• track the testing process. Test management is crucial to any testing effort, no matter what the mix of manual and automated testing. Test management tools function as the hub of testing efforts, guiding the overall testing process from start to finish and providing insight into its progress and results. Test management tools are especially important for large scale and distributed testing efforts.
Clearly, Indian IT-BPOs focused on the Testing Services marketplace have to tune themselves to the emerging technology and business trends shaping this opportunity. Investments in the right testing tools, relevant testing methodologies and skilled manpower is becoming a must today. Indian IT-BPO organizations need to keep these factors in mind to step up their share in the fast growth Testing Services segment.
Service Oriented Architecture, is currently the hottest buzzword defining the networked environment today. Simply put, SOA is an architecture that relies on service-orientation as its fundamental design principle.
The growing influence of SOA, is bringing about changes within an organization, making software quality both more important and more difficult to achieve. This in turn is altering the Testing scenario, as an SOA environment makes traditional approaches to software testing insufficient.
A recent study by Forrester Research on SOA's impact on Testing Services reveals that IT organizations pursuing SOA are having to rethink their testing methods and revising testing roles and responsibilities. What this means that Outsourced Testing Services providers too must relook at their testing methodologies.
Software quality poses a significant challenge for IT organizations, especially when it comes to the quality of custom applications. Defects in any type of application can disrupt the business and waste precious IT resources and in an SOA environment, the consequences of defects can be even more severe. The defects in services will further lead to defects in applications that consume those services. Quality problems in a particular service will also cause it to be abandoned by development teams, which will lower the benefits from the overall SOA initiative. Furthermore, defected services can create strain between departments, business units and companies.

A change of Testing Outlook
Keeping this problem in mind, Forrester suggests that organizations change their testing methods to cater to the emerging SOA environment. The Forrester Study indicates that SOA requires changes to the way that IT shops test the services they expose and the applications that consume them. IT services vendors now need to test services in isolation, test them earlier in the life cycle, and test them through an independent group that must conduct another round of service testing.
Even with specialized testers dedicated to service testing, other testers will still feel the impact of SOA; testing at the application level is more complex when an application consumes services. If an online banking application returns incorrect customer data, testers must be able to trace the error to a customer information service so that the owner of that service can diagnose and repair the defect. This requires an understanding of the services an application leverages and how the application interacts with those services. No matter where the testers conducting system testing report today to application delivery teams or to an independent testing organization they will be affected by their organization's adoption of SOA.