System Integrators

Business Opportunity

Software testing, a 13 billion dollars market by 2010

In this fast-growing sector, the software testing services and qualification market should touch 13 billion dollars by 2010, of which 45% will be outsourced, according to a Gartner study. As for automated software quality tools, the market should touch 1.9 billion dollars in 2009 with the functional testing market making up 30% of the market.

The Indian software and IT services market had already reached 30 billion dollars by the end of 2006, of which 80% was exported as offshore outsourced activities. Of the 1.3 million computer engineers working in India today 30% are dedicated to software quality. An estimated 50% of them (i.e. about 200,000) are specialized testing engineers.

According to Gartner, the software testing market in India is set to cross 700 million dollars by the end of 2007.

Smartesting® Vision

Smartesting® has made India a key part of its growth strategy and aims to generate half of its turnover in the Indian market by 2010.

This strategy goes hand in hand with the boom of offshoring – software development outsourcing by large corporations and IT services companies in India – and the implementation of ‘software testing centres’ geared to certify software before they are put to use in Europe or the USA.

This explains why the application testing market is seeing a 100% growth as opposed to a 30% growth for “traditional” service activities. For example, the Indian software giant Wipro employs 4000 engineers dedicated to testing and validation activities. The increase in the number of testers at Cognizant Technology Services in India is, likewise, impressive: 200 testers in 2004, 1000 in 2005 and the numbers have grown to 2000 in 2006.

The “Test Factory” term is justified and is even rather apt. It is used to designate the automation of the delivery process for an application and the grouping of resources into centres of excellence.