The Changing Paradigm of Testing Industry

Software testing was an important turning point in the IT industry. It has changed the face of the software world today. In today's world, consumer expectations are very high on quality. They want customized access from anywhere, anytime, through any device and within no time and with no glitches. Satisfying such consumer needs and expectations of high quality were only possible by immense software testing. Testing has optimized software business products and has lessened the complexities faced by software developers. It has helped improve the overall software development life cycle.

Opening the event with a keynote session, Arun Kumar Singh, Vice President and Global Head Testing ,Financial Services, Wipro, threw some light on the importance of testing in today's business and tried to forecast where testing will go in years ahead. He spoke about 1.0, 2.0 and 3.0 phases of software testing.

He said, "Testing 1.0 saw testing being done as part of a debugging process, mostly by the developers themselves and the impact of testing was not measured. However, Testing 2.0 where we are today has seen the progress to separate testing groups, very mature processes, use of tools coupled with continuous measurements and improvements. Off shoring and Testing Center of Excellence (TCoE) is part of this journey. Testing 2.0 has improved the cost, quality and time-to market parameters."

According to Arun, testers are the custodians of customer experience. Testing is complex work that requires not only envisaging all positive scenarios in which the product or service works, but also includes identifying all possible negative scenarios. Thus a tester has to do two roles, one is constructive and the other is being destructive. The role necessitates a mastery over the business process or domain, testing techniques, platform skills and an urge to go where no one has gone before. It does not come readymade or via a crash course and hence testing has evolved as a career. Testing needs specialization today. Testing groups have a career path starting with fresh college grads moving all the way to CXO.

Discussing more on testing 3.0, Arun added that testing 3.0 envisages testing graduating from technical excellence to assuring customer experience. In testing 3.0, the CXO level involvement will be essential, and they would do so if the value of testing is well understood and articulated. Cost to quality will be clearly understood, measured and tracked. There is a trend of the CIO reporting to CFO. In this situation, the value of testing will have to be presented in financial terms. The focus moves from 100 percent testing to the right amount of testing that's needed for the assurance. Off shoring will have to move beyond its challenges of communications, right skill sets, management-vendor relations, global infrastructure availability and quality and ever increasing client expectations. It's an opportunity for large testing service providers to move to next level and provide testing as a service (TaaS) that includes application, data and infrastructure, small firms to excel in business process assurance which may be a niche. It's a time when paradigm is shifting from large servers in a location to virtual servers, COTS products and international yet global enterprises. This is an opportunity to new testing firms to be born with focused offerings as it's almost score 0-0 and the game is re-starting.

Some of the experts in the industry have predicted that testing will globally grow, over the next 5 years at a CAGR (Compound Annual Growth Rate) of 11 percent to 14 percent. India is at the forefront and hence benefits the most from it. With this pace of growth it would be vital to have skilled manpower and continuous innovation. The testing technology excellence will become a hygiene factor and more focus would be needed onto the customer and consumer experience.

Source:

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