If seeing is believing, trying it out makes business sense. Software quality assurance and testing is increasingly becoming a mainstream activity for software players, say industry watchers. Alongside this, a plethora of technologies is emerging to make the testing processes more comprehensive. Given the current environment of competition on the one hand, and regulatory and compliance pressures on the other, testing is emerging a high priority in the CIO’s agenda, say industry people.
Key market drivers
“Testing, as a service, is gaining traction for five key reasons: (a)as a large number of applications go online, a robust testing infrastructure becomes imperative for handling huge transaction volumes in real time; (b) with more and more mission-critical applications coming on the horizon, testing them for performance and ruggedness becomes critical; (c) the number of testing tools now available in the market necessitates the need to provide an integrated testing service in different environments; (d) with product companies adopting independent verification and validation tests to crunch cycle-time for deployment of their products, the launch of a well-tested product helps gain market share early, and finally, the maturing offshore software services sector is accelerating the growth of the testing services market,” says Sumithra. Vice-President, Testing Practice, Cognizant.
Industry analysts expect the global market for testing services to grow to $13 billion by 2010. At least 50 per cent, they anticipate, would be outsourced, and India, according to reports, has the potential to garner 70 per cent of the outsourced testing market.
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Studies show that finding and fixing defects during testing execution can cost 50 times more than during the early requirements phase, and 200 times more, if left undetected until after production. It is, therefore, crucial for companies to adhere to structured testing processes.
Interestingly, with a large number of applications going online, applications that were once used by business users are now being used by end-user communities as well.
Sangeeta Das, Global Head (Testing and BPO Practice), Intelligroup, says testing is an integral part of the software development and maintenance process. “Companies have turned to outsourcing testing services because it offers other advantages beyond cost, such as reduced cycle time and shorter time to market, without compromising on the results,” she avers.
Grunt work still a big part of it
The basic approach to testing has not changed much. Functional testing comprises about 80 per cent of all software testing work. This is still largely executed manually, and, in many cases, is tedious, error-prone and time-consuming.
However, with agile testing methodologies coming into play, organisations have realised that the total cost of ownership can be reduced by focusing on testing.
Companies look to enhance the effectiveness of their testing processes and optimise the spend on people and tools. They leverage standard models such as TPI and TMM, besides developing their own models to test maturity assessments. New paradigms of Web 2.0 and SOA testing are also gaining ground as companies get increasingly comfortable with open source tools and techniques, say industry watchers.
Security testing is a new growth area. It has become a mainstream offering in the last couple of years, says S R Ramaswami, Executive Vice-President and Head (Insurance solutions and Application Certification), Polaris Software Labs.
Virtusa Corporation says it increasingly focuses on risk-based and benefit-based testing to optimise the testing effort and spend, apart from using the traditional testing model. “In product companies, test-driven development is gaining importance. Virtusa has developed a new testing approach by leveraging ‘Test Platforms’ to meet customer requirements,” says its Director (Quality Assurance), Paresh Shrivastava.
Testing for performance, though, is not cheap and organisations look to innovative commercial and operating models. “Most IT companies skip performance testing (of application) before releasing the application,” says Aashu Chandra, Head (Testing Practice), Infogain. For testing an application, Infogain prepares a testing strategy and plan and carries out various validation and verification steps, he says.
The Cognizant testing practice has registered a ten-fold growth from about 800 career testers to over 8,000 in the last four years. While the company has an elaborate recruitment and training programme for its testers, has recognised the growth and success of its testing practice as a key component of its engagement with clients in reducing the cost of IT applications development and maintenance, Sumithra concedes that there are challenges.
These revolve around the talent gap, deep domain expertise, complexity of applications (especially those interfacing with real time applications) and regulations that prevent offshore access to applications, due to data privacy or security reasons.
“Even though there is increase in mind share for Testing, this is one area that gets neglected in large project planning in terms of time allocation. Often times, it is a crunch situation, trying to deliver within a limited time and ensuring quality,” says Sangeetha of Intelligroup.
Code of conduct desirable
Industry insiders raise another issue: How fool-proof is the testing? “One can test again and again in the right order and manner, make sure that the application/product is reliable, increase test coverage, detect meaningful defects and reduce time to test. This can be achieved by considering product risk, failure risk, scope, timelines and the quality drivers,” says Shrivastava.
Though there have been no big horror stories yet, it is clear that testers have access to sensitive data. There have also been instances where faults have been released knowingly, without testing adequately because of time constraints, and these have compromised the business interests of the clients.
“As an industry we need to have a code of conduct for all testers in the areas of client confidentiality, competence and Intellectual Property Rights (IPR),” stresses Shrivastava.
While software professionals agree that testing is a specialised domain and there is immense potential for growth in this area, freshers are, by and large, apprehensive about taking to it as a career path. This is impacting the talent pool available for testing, says Aashu Chandra of Infogain.
How they go about it
At Virtusa, there are over 1,000 professional testers who use proprietary methodologies to carry out testing for enterprises as well as product companies. The company has built an independent Test Facility that offers ‘on demand’ testing services in various areas.
Polaris has established PACE (Polaris Application Certification Enterprise), in the banking, financial services and insurance (BFSI) software testing market, where over 1,100 testing professionals render testing service. The company has now come up with Testing Centre of Excellence solutions. It has invested in local labs across geographies, taken a tool-driven approach around consolidating investments in software testing tools.
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“Since testing of business solutions requires deep domain knowledge, we engage business analysts and process consultants in testing projects during the early stages of testing engagement,” says Janardhanan, Vice-President (Technology Services and Quality) ITC Infotech.
Cognizant recruits raw talent and puts it through training on a testing-specific curriculum.
:smart:
Key market drivers
“Testing, as a service, is gaining traction for five key reasons: (a)as a large number of applications go online, a robust testing infrastructure becomes imperative for handling huge transaction volumes in real time; (b) with more and more mission-critical applications coming on the horizon, testing them for performance and ruggedness becomes critical; (c) the number of testing tools now available in the market necessitates the need to provide an integrated testing service in different environments; (d) with product companies adopting independent verification and validation tests to crunch cycle-time for deployment of their products, the launch of a well-tested product helps gain market share early, and finally, the maturing offshore software services sector is accelerating the growth of the testing services market,” says Sumithra. Vice-President, Testing Practice, Cognizant.
Industry analysts expect the global market for testing services to grow to $13 billion by 2010. At least 50 per cent, they anticipate, would be outsourced, and India, according to reports, has the potential to garner 70 per cent of the outsourced testing market.
More India business stories | Get the latest Sensex update
Studies show that finding and fixing defects during testing execution can cost 50 times more than during the early requirements phase, and 200 times more, if left undetected until after production. It is, therefore, crucial for companies to adhere to structured testing processes.
Interestingly, with a large number of applications going online, applications that were once used by business users are now being used by end-user communities as well.
Sangeeta Das, Global Head (Testing and BPO Practice), Intelligroup, says testing is an integral part of the software development and maintenance process. “Companies have turned to outsourcing testing services because it offers other advantages beyond cost, such as reduced cycle time and shorter time to market, without compromising on the results,” she avers.
Grunt work still a big part of it
The basic approach to testing has not changed much. Functional testing comprises about 80 per cent of all software testing work. This is still largely executed manually, and, in many cases, is tedious, error-prone and time-consuming.
However, with agile testing methodologies coming into play, organisations have realised that the total cost of ownership can be reduced by focusing on testing.
Companies look to enhance the effectiveness of their testing processes and optimise the spend on people and tools. They leverage standard models such as TPI and TMM, besides developing their own models to test maturity assessments. New paradigms of Web 2.0 and SOA testing are also gaining ground as companies get increasingly comfortable with open source tools and techniques, say industry watchers.
Security testing is a new growth area. It has become a mainstream offering in the last couple of years, says S R Ramaswami, Executive Vice-President and Head (Insurance solutions and Application Certification), Polaris Software Labs.
Virtusa Corporation says it increasingly focuses on risk-based and benefit-based testing to optimise the testing effort and spend, apart from using the traditional testing model. “In product companies, test-driven development is gaining importance. Virtusa has developed a new testing approach by leveraging ‘Test Platforms’ to meet customer requirements,” says its Director (Quality Assurance), Paresh Shrivastava.
Testing for performance, though, is not cheap and organisations look to innovative commercial and operating models. “Most IT companies skip performance testing (of application) before releasing the application,” says Aashu Chandra, Head (Testing Practice), Infogain. For testing an application, Infogain prepares a testing strategy and plan and carries out various validation and verification steps, he says.
The Cognizant testing practice has registered a ten-fold growth from about 800 career testers to over 8,000 in the last four years. While the company has an elaborate recruitment and training programme for its testers, has recognised the growth and success of its testing practice as a key component of its engagement with clients in reducing the cost of IT applications development and maintenance, Sumithra concedes that there are challenges.
These revolve around the talent gap, deep domain expertise, complexity of applications (especially those interfacing with real time applications) and regulations that prevent offshore access to applications, due to data privacy or security reasons.
“Even though there is increase in mind share for Testing, this is one area that gets neglected in large project planning in terms of time allocation. Often times, it is a crunch situation, trying to deliver within a limited time and ensuring quality,” says Sangeetha of Intelligroup.
Code of conduct desirable
Industry insiders raise another issue: How fool-proof is the testing? “One can test again and again in the right order and manner, make sure that the application/product is reliable, increase test coverage, detect meaningful defects and reduce time to test. This can be achieved by considering product risk, failure risk, scope, timelines and the quality drivers,” says Shrivastava.
Though there have been no big horror stories yet, it is clear that testers have access to sensitive data. There have also been instances where faults have been released knowingly, without testing adequately because of time constraints, and these have compromised the business interests of the clients.
“As an industry we need to have a code of conduct for all testers in the areas of client confidentiality, competence and Intellectual Property Rights (IPR),” stresses Shrivastava.
While software professionals agree that testing is a specialised domain and there is immense potential for growth in this area, freshers are, by and large, apprehensive about taking to it as a career path. This is impacting the talent pool available for testing, says Aashu Chandra of Infogain.
How they go about it
At Virtusa, there are over 1,000 professional testers who use proprietary methodologies to carry out testing for enterprises as well as product companies. The company has built an independent Test Facility that offers ‘on demand’ testing services in various areas.
Polaris has established PACE (Polaris Application Certification Enterprise), in the banking, financial services and insurance (BFSI) software testing market, where over 1,100 testing professionals render testing service. The company has now come up with Testing Centre of Excellence solutions. It has invested in local labs across geographies, taken a tool-driven approach around consolidating investments in software testing tools.
Tips to book profits in stock markets! Click here
“Since testing of business solutions requires deep domain knowledge, we engage business analysts and process consultants in testing projects during the early stages of testing engagement,” says Janardhanan, Vice-President (Technology Services and Quality) ITC Infotech.
Cognizant recruits raw talent and puts it through training on a testing-specific curriculum.
:smart:
